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Cited by 219

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

The Lie That Heals: The Ethics of Giving Placebos

BRODY, HOWARD·1982·Annals of Internal Medicine

Abstract

The 170-year-long debate in the medical literature about the ethics of prescribing placebos in medical therapeutics needs to be reevaluated in light of recent placebo research and improved understanding of the placebo effect as an integral part of the doctor-patient relationship. It has traditionally been assumed that deception is an indispensible component of successful placebo use. Therefore, placebos have been attacked because they are deceptive, and defended on the grounds that the deception is illusory or that the beneficent intentions of the physician justify the deception. However, a proper understanding of the placebo effect shows that deception need play no essential role in eliciting this powerful therapeutic modality; physicians can see nondeceptive means to promote a positive placebo response in their patients.

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Metadata

Authors
BRODY, H.
Venue
Annals of Internal Medicine
Published
1982-07-01
Volume
97
Issue
1
Pages
112-118
ISSN
  • 0003-4819 (ISSN-L)
  • 1539-3704
OpenAlex
W2110759081
Cited by
219
References
2
FWCI
4.92
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed

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CoChat. (2026). Citation check: The Lie That Heals: The Ethics of Giving Placebos. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.7326/0003-4819-97-1-112
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BRODY, H. (1982). The Lie That Heals: The Ethics of Giving Placebos. Annals of Internal Medicine. https://doi.org/10.7326/0003-4819-97-1-112

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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).

Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.