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
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.
Overview
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Verification
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Citations
Cites
Principles of Biomedical Ethics
(2012) · Thieves of Virtue · doi:10.7551/mitpress/9079.003.0009 · Cited by 13,453
THE MECHANISM OF PLACEBO ANALGESIA
Levine, J., Gordon, N., & Fields, H. (1978) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/s0140-6736(78)92762-9 · Cited by 1,094
Cited by
Determining Optimal Therapy — Randomized Trials in Individual Patients
Guyatt, G., Sackett, D., Taylor, D. W., Ghong, J., Roberts, R., & Pugsley, S. (1986) · New England Journal of Medicine · doi:10.1056/nejm198604033141406 · Cited by 579
Tuberculosis and human immunodeficiency virus infection in developing countries
Harries, A. D. (1990) · The Lancet · doi:10.1016/0140-6736(90)90216-r · Cited by 268
The Placebo Effect: Illness and Interpersonal Healing
Miller, F. G., Colloca, L., & Kaptchuk, T. J. (2009) · Perspectives in Biology and Medicine · doi:10.1353/pbm.0.0115 · Cited by 254
How expectations influence pain
Fields, H. L. (2018) · Pain · doi:10.1097/j.pain.0000000000001272 · Cited by 175
Defining the predictors of the placebo response in irritable bowel syndrome
Pitz, M., Cheang, M., & Bernstein, C. N. (2005) · Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology · doi:10.1016/s1542-3565(04)00626-3 · Cited by 111
Metadata
- Authors
- BRODY, H.
- Venue
- Annals of Internal Medicine
- Publisher
- American College of Physicians
- 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
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
How to cite
Cite CoChat for the checks on this page, and the paper for its own findings.
- This page
- 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
- The paper
- 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
Data sources
Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
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.