Results for 'placebo'

39 found
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  1. Placebo trials without mechanisms: How far can they go?David Teira - 2019 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 77 (C):101177.
    In this paper, Isuggest that placebo effects, as we know them today, should be understood as experimental phenomena, low-level regularities whose causal structure is grasped through particular experimental designs with little theoretical guidance. Focusing on placebo interventions with needles for pain reduction -one of the few placebo regularities that seems to arise in meta-analytical studies- I discuss the extent to which it is possible to decompose the different factors at play through more fine-grained randomized clinical trials. My (...)
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  2.  44
    The “placebo” paradox and the emotion paradox: Challenges to psychological explanation.Phil Hutchinson - 2020 - Theory and Psychology 30 (5):617-637.
    Philosophical debates about how best to explain emotion or placebo are debates about how best to characterise and explain the distinctive form of human responsiveness to the world that is the object of interest for each of those domains of inquiry. In emotion research, the cognitive theory of emotion faces several intractable problems. I discuss two of these: the problem of epistemic deficit and the problem of recalcitrant emotions. Cognitive explanations in Placebo Studies, such as response-expectancy and belief-based (...)
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  3. Placebo Effects and Informed Consent.Mark Alfano - 2015 - American Journal of Bioethics 15 (10):3-12.
    The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the process of informing cannot be considered independently from the potential effects of treatment. (...)
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  4. Psychotherapy, placebos, and informed consent.Garson Leder - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (7):444-447.
    Several authors have recently argued that psychotherapy, as it is commonly practiced, is deceptive and undermines patients’ ability to give informed consent to treatment. This ‘deception’ claim is based on the findings that some, and possibly most, of the ameliorative effects in psychotherapeutic interventions are mediated by therapeutic common factors shared by successful treatments, rather than because of theory-specific techniques. These findings have led to claims that psychotherapy is, at least partly, likely a placebo, and that practitioners of psychotherapy (...)
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  5. Placebo Use in the United Kingdom: Results from a National Survey of Primary Care Practitioners.Jeremy Howick - 2013 - PLoS 8 (3).
    Objectives -/- Surveys in various countries suggest 17% to 80% of doctors prescribe ‘placebos’ in routine practice, but prevalence of placebo use in UK primary care is unknown. Methods -/- We administered a web-based questionnaire to a representative sample of UK general practitioners. Following surveys conducted in other countries we divided placebos into ‘pure’ and ‘impure’. ‘Impure’ placebos are interventions with clear efficacy for certain conditions but are prescribed for ailments where their efficacy is unknown, such as antibiotics for (...)
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  6.  91
    The Meaning Response, "Placebo," and Methods.Phil Hutchinson & Daniel E. Moerman - 2018 - Perspectives in Biology and Medicine 61 (3):361-378.
    Is there a response, which is not accounted for by regression to the mean, natural history, the Hawthorne effect?The term placebo comes to us from the Latin for "I shall please," indicating that the phenomenon known as the "placebo effect" or "placebo response" has been familiar to medical practitioners for a number of centuries, at least. As we reached the mid-20th century and randomized controlled trials became a central feature of medical research, the use of controls and (...)
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  7. The Ethics of Placebo-controlled Trials: Methodological Justifications.Joseph Millum & Christine Grady - 2013 - Contemporary Clinical Trials 36 (2):510-14.
    The use of placebo controls in clinical trials remains controversial. Ethical analysis and international ethical guidance permit the use of placebo controls in randomized trials when scientifically indicated in four cases: (1) when there is no proven effective treatment for the condition under study; (2) when withholding treatment poses negligible risks to participants; (3) when there are compelling methodological reasons for using placebo, and withholding treatment does not pose a risk of serious harm to participants; and, more (...)
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  8.  64
    Symptom perception, placebo effects, and the Bayesian brain.Giulio Ongaro & Ted Kaptchuk - 2019 - PAIN 160 (1):1-4.
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  9. Linguistic Relativity in Placebo.Pater Ciprian - manuscript
    Current hypothesis claims that language plays a significant role in regulating the placebo effect and begins by discussing the concept of the placebo effect and its potential impact on clinical trials and medical treatments. The paper describes the findings of a study on the Spanish language and its potential relationship in affecting the placebo effect through the known "Hispanic paradox". The paper goes on to discuss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its potential implications for the relationship between language, (...)
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  10.  37
    Questioning the Consensus on Placebo and Nocebo Effects.Doug Hardman, Phil Hutchinson & Giulio Ongaro - 2021 - Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 90 (3):211–212.
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  11. (1 other version)Reactivity in Social Scientific experiments: What is it and how is it different (and worse) than a Placebo effect?María Jiménez-Buedo - 2021 - European Journal of Philosophy of Science 11 (2): 1-22.
    Reactivity, or the phenomenon by which subjects tend to modify their behavior in virtue of their being studied upon, is often cited as one of the most important difficulties involved in social scientific experiments, and yet, there is to date a persistent conceptual muddle when dealing with the many dimensions of reactivity. This paper offers a conceptual framework for reactivity that draws on an interventionist approach to causality. The framework allows us to offer an unambiguous definition of reactivity and distinguishes (...)
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  12. Relieving pain using dose-extending placebos.Luana Colloca, Paul Enck & David DeGrazia - 2016 - PAIN 157:1590-1598.
    Placebos are often used by clinicians, usually deceptively and with little rationale or evidence of benefit, making their use ethically problematic. In contrast with their typical current use, a provocative line of research suggests that placebos can be intentionally exploited to extend analgesic therapeutic effects. Is it possible to extend the effects of drug treatments by interspersing placebos? We reviewed a database of placebo studies, searching for studies that indicate that placebos given after repeated administration of active treatments acquire (...)
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  13. Ravines and Sugar Pills: Defending Deceptive Placebo Use.Jonathan Pugh - 2015 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 40 (1):83-101.
    In this paper, I argue that deceptive placebo use can be morally permissible, on the grounds that the deception involved in the prescription of deceptive placebos can differ in kind to the sorts of deception that undermine personal autonomy. In order to argue this, I shall first delineate two accounts of why deception is inimical to autonomy. On these accounts, deception is understood to be inimical to the deceived agent’s autonomy because it either involves subjugating the deceived agent’s will (...)
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  14. The Social Epistemology of Clinical Placebos.Melissa Rees - 2024 - Journal of Medicine and Philosophy 49 (3):233-245.
    Many extant theories of placebo focus on their causal structure wherein placebo effects are those that originate from select features of the therapy (e.g., client expectations or “incidental” features like size and shape). Although such accounts can distinguish placebos from standard medical treatments, they cannot distinguish placebos from everyday occurrences, for example, when positive feedback improves our performance on a task. Providing a social-epistemological account of a treatment context can rule out such occurrences, and furthermore reveal a new (...)
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  15. Placebos, Full Disclosure, and Trust: The Risks and Benefits of Disclosing Risks and Benefits.Peter H. Schwartz - 2015 - American Journal of Bioethics 15 (10):13-14.
    Consider the following patient: a 40-year-old man who has had back pain that radiates down his left leg, on and off for 2 months. He performs his normal activities and does not have any “red flag”...
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  16. The ethics of placebo-controlled trials in developing countries to prevent mother-to-child transmission of HIV.John N. Williams - 2000 - Annals, Academy of Medicine, Singapore 29 (5):557-562.
    Placebo-trials on HIV-infected pregnant women in developing countries like Thailand and Uganda have provoked recent controversy. Such experiments aim to find a treatment that will cut the rate of vertical transmission more efficiently than existing treatments like zidovudine. This scenario is first stated as generally as possible, before three ethical principles found in the Belmont Report, itself a sharpening of the Helsinki Declaration, are stated. These three principles are the Principle of Utility, the Principle of Autonomy and the Principle (...)
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  17. Applying evidence to support ethical decisions: Is the placebo really powerless?Prof Dr Franz Porzsolt, Nicole Scholtz-Gorton, Nikola Biller-Andorno, Anke Thim, Karin Meissner, Irmgard Roeckl-Wiedmann, Barbara Herzberger, Renatus Ziegler, Wilhelm Gaus & Ernst Pöppel - 2004 - Science and Engineering Ethics 10 (1):119-132.
    Using placebos in day-to-day practice is an ethical problem. This paper summarises the available epidemiological evidence to support this difficult decision. Based on these data we propose to differentiate between placebo and “knowledge framing”. While the use of placebo should be confined to experimental settings in clinical trials, knowledge framing — which is only conceptually different from placebo — is a desired, expected and necessary component of any doctor-patient encounter. Examples from daily practice demonstrate both, the need (...)
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  18. Hypothesis of Buddhism activity of freeing captive animals in huge amount may have quantum superposition effects of consciousness and lead to discernible placebo effects.Huayue Kang - 2017 - Journal of Brief Ideas 1 (1):1.
    1: Placebo effect sometimes plausibly has powerful effects. 2: Buddhism philosophy holds that every living animal is sentient, and has a consciousness and killing them is bad for the killer and freeing them is good somehow. Consciousness may involve some aspects of quantum mechanism as Roger Penrose’s Orch OR' theory of consciousness pointed out. -/- 3: Although previous studies show that there is no “demonstrable effects of distant intercessory prayer. Anecdotal cases of a special kind of Buddhist activity of (...)
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  19. What You Don't Know Can Help You: The Ethics of Placebo Treatment.Daniel Groll - 2011 - Journal of Applied Philosophy 28 (2):188-202.
    abstract Is it permissible for a doctor or nurse to knowingly administer a placebo in a clinical setting? There is certainly something suspicious about it: placebos are typically said to be ‘sham’ treatments, with no ‘active’ properties and so giving a placebo is usually thought to involve tricking or deceiving the patient who expects a genuine treatment. Nonetheless, some physicians have recently suggested that placebo treatments are sometimes the best way to help their patients and can be (...)
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  20. Explaining the placebo effect: Aliefs, beliefs, and conditioning.Matthew Haug - 2011 - Philosophical Psychology 24 (5):679-698.
    There are a number of competing psychological accounts of the placebo effect, and much of the recent debate centers on the relative importance of classical conditioning and conscious beliefs. In this paper, I discuss apparent problems with these accounts and with?disjunctive? accounts that deny that placebo effects can be given a unified psychological explanation. The fact that some placebo effects seem to be mediated by cognitive states with content that is consciously inaccessible and inferentially isolated from a (...)
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  21. More than consent for ethical open-label placebo research.Laura Specker Sullivan - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12):e7-e7.
    Recent studies have explored the effectiveness of open-label placebos for a variety of conditions, including chronic pain, cancer-related fatigue and irritable bowel syndrome. OLPs are thought to sidestep traditional ethical worries about placebos because they do not involve deception: with an OLP, patients or subjects are told outright that they are not given an active substance. As deception is framed as the primary hurdle to ethical placebo use, the door is ostensibly opened to ethical studies of OLPs. In this (...)
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  22. Telling the Truth About Pain: Informed Consent and the Role of Expectation in Pain Intensity.Nada Gligorov - 2018 - American Journal of Bioethics Neuroscience 9 (3):173-182.
    Health care providers are expected both to relieve pain and to provide anticipatory guidance regarding how much a procedure is going to hurt. Fulfilling those expectations is complicated by the cognitive modulation of pain perception. Warning people to expect pain or setting expectations for pain relief not only influences their subjective experience, but it also alters how nociceptive stimuli are processed throughout the sensory and discriminative pathways in the brain. In light of this, I reconsider the characterization of placebo (...)
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  23. Recommendations for the development, implementation, and reporting of control interventions in efficacy and mechanistic trials of physical, psychological, and self-management therapies: the CoPPS Statement.David Hohenschurz-Schmidt - 2023 - Bmj 381.
    Control interventions (often called “sham,” “placebo,” or “attention controls”) are essential for studying the efficacy or mechanism of physical, psychological, and self-management interventions in clinical trials. This article presents core recommendations for designing, conducting, and reporting control interventions to establish a quality standard in nonpharmacological intervention research. A framework of additional considerations supports researchers’ decision making in this context. We also provide a reporting checklist for control interventions to enhance research transparency, usefulness, and rigour.
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  24. (1 other version)Unethical informed consent caused by overlooking poorly measured nocebo effects.Jeremy Howick - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 16:00-03.
    Unlike its friendly cousin the placebo effect, the nocebo effect (the effect of expecting a negative outcome) has been almost ignored. Epistemic and ethical confusions related to its existence have gone all but unnoticed. Contrary to what is often asserted, adverse events following from taking placebo interventions are not necessarily nocebo effects; they could have arisen due to natural history. Meanwhile, ethical informed consent (in clinical trials and clinical practice) has centred almost exclusively on the need to inform (...)
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  25. Pain: Modularity and Cognitive Constitution.Błażej Skrzypulec - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    Discussions concerning the modularity of the pain system have been focused on questions regarding the cognitive penetrability of pain mechanisms. It has been claimed that phenomena such as placebo analgesia demonstrate that the pain system is cognitively penetrated; therefore, it is not encapsulated from central cognition. However, important arguments have been formulated which aim to show that cognitive penetrability does not in fact entail a lack of modularity of the pain system. This paper offers an alternative way to reject (...)
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  26. What's the Harm? Why the Mainstreaming of Complementary and Alternative Medicine is an Ethical Problem.Lawrence Torcello - 2013 - Ethics in Biology, Engineering and Medicine 4 (4):333-344.
    This paper argues that it is morally irresponsible for modern medical providers or health care institutions to support and advocate the integration of CAM practices (i.e. homeopathy, acupuncture, energy healing, etc.) with conventional modern medicine. The results of such practices are not reliable beyond that of placebo. As a corollary, it is argued that prescribing placebos perceived to stand outside the norm of modern medicine is morally inappropriate. Even when such treatments do no direct physical harm, they create unnecessary (...)
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  27. COVID-19 vaccine trial ethics once we have efficacious vaccines.David Wendler, Jorge Ochoa, Joseph Millum, Christine Grady & Holly Taylor - 2020 - Science 370 (6522):1277-1279.
    Some placebo-controlled trials can continue ethically after a candidate vaccine is found to be safe and efficacious.
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  28. How to obtain informed consent for psychotherapy: a reply to criticism.Garson Leder - 2021 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (7):450-451.
    In ‘Psychotherapy, Placebos and Informed Consent’, I argued that the minimal standard for informed consent in psychotherapy requires that ‘patients understand that there is currently no consensus about the mechanisms of change in psychotherapy, and that the therapy on offer…is based on disputed theoretical foundations’, and that the dissemination of this information is compatible with the delivery of many theory-specific forms of psychotherapy (including cognitive behavioural therapy [CBT]). I also argued that the minimal requirements for informed consent do not include (...)
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  29. (1 other version)The science of belief: A progress report.Nicolas Porot & Eric Mandelbaum - forthcoming - WIREs Cognitive Science 1.
    The empirical study of belief is emerging at a rapid clip, uniting work from all corners of cognitive science. Reliance on belief in understanding and predicting behavior is widespread. Examples can be found, inter alia, in the placebo, attribution theory, theory of mind, and comparative psychological literatures. Research on belief also provides evidence for robust generalizations, including about how we fix, store, and change our beliefs. Evidence supports the existence of a Spinozan system of belief fixation: one that is (...)
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  30. What are Side Effects?Austin Due - 2023 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 13 (1):1-21.
    Side effects are ubiquitous in medicine and they often play a role in treatment decisions for patients and clinicians alike. Philosophers and health researchers often use side effects to illustrate issues with contemporary medical research and practice. However, technical definitions of ‘side effect’ differ among health authorities. Thus, determining the side effects of an intervention can differ depending on whose definition we assume. Here I review some of the common definitions of side effect and highlight their issues. In response, I (...)
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  31. What Does It Mean to Have a Meaning Problem? Meaning, Skill, and the Mechanisms of Change in Psychotherapy.Garson Leder - 2019 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 26 (3):35-50.
    Psychotherapy is effective. Since the 1970’s, meta-analyses, and meta-analyses of meta-analyses, have consistently shown a significant effect size for psychotherapeutic interventions when compared to no treatment or placebo treatments. This effectiveness is normally taken as a sign of the scientific legitimization of clinical psychotherapy. A significant problem, however, is that most psychotherapies appear to be equally effective. This poses a problem for specific psychotherapies: they may work, but likely not for the reasons that ground their theoretical explanations for their (...)
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  32. Cutting to the Core: Exploring the Ethics of Contested Surgeries.Michael Benatar, Leslie Cannold, Dena Davis, Merle Spriggs, Julian Savulescu, Heather Draper, Neil Evans, Richard Hull, Stephen Wilkinson, David Wasserman, Donna Dickenson, Guy Widdershoven, Françoise Baylis, Stephen Coleman, Rosemarie Tong, Hilde Lindemann, David Neil & Alex John London - 2006 - Rowman & Littlefield Publishers.
    When the benefits of surgery do not outweigh the harms or where they do not clearly do so, surgical interventions become morally contested. Cutting to the Core examines a number of such surgeries, including infant male circumcision and cutting the genitals of female children, the separation of conjoined twins, surgical sex assignment of intersex children and the surgical re-assignment of transsexuals, limb and face transplantation, cosmetic surgery, and placebo surgery.
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  33. "We Are the Disease": Truth, Health, and Politics from Plato's Gorgias to Foucault.C. T. Ricciardone - 2014 - Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 18 (2):287-310.
    Starting from the importance of the figure of the parrhesiastes—the political and therapeutic truth-teller—for Foucault’s understanding of the care of the self, this paper traces the political figuration of the analogy between philosophers and physicians on the one hand, and rhetors and disease on the other in Plato’s Gorgias. I show how rhetoric, in the form of ventriloquism, infects the text itself, and then ask how we account for the effect of the “contaminated” philosophical dialogue on our readerly health. Is (...)
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  34. Exercise Prescription and The Doctor's Duty of Non-Maleficence.Jonathan Pugh, Christopher Pugh & Julian Savulesu - 2017 - British Journal of Sports Medicine 51 (21):1555-1556.
    An abundance of data unequivocally shows that exercise can be an effective tool in the fight against obesity and its associated co-morbidities. Indeed, physical activity can be more effective than widely-used pharmaceutical interventions. Whilst metformin reduces the incidence of diabetes by 31% (as compared with a placebo) in both men and women across different racial and ethnic groups, lifestyle intervention (including exercise) reduces the incidence by 58%. In this context, it is notable that a group of prominent medics and (...)
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  35. An unattractive hypothesis – RCTs' descent to non-science.Clifford Miller - 2011 - International Journal of Person Centered Medicine 1 (4):841-842.
    Eyal Shahar’s essay review [1] of James Penston’s remarkable book [2] seems more inspired playful academic provocation than review or essay, expressing dramatic views of impossible validity. The account given of modern biostatistical causation reveals the slide from science into the intellectual confusion and non-science RCTs have created: “…. the purpose of medical research is to estimate the magnitude of the effect of a causal contrast, for example the probability ratio of a binary outcome …” But Shahar’s world is simultaneously (...)
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  36. A Comparison Of Modern Science With Vedic Science.Subhendu Das - 2019 - Research and Science Today 17 (1):143-168.
    This Is A Review Of Multi-Disciplinary Research Articles On The Title Subject, Published In Various Peer Reviewed Journals, Professional Conferences, And Scientific Books, Including The Books Of Religions. (A) There Was A Time When Vedas Were Known All Over The World. You Can See The Influences Of Vedas In The Books Of All Modern Religions. For Example, Yoga And Yogic Powers Are Described In Bible And Also In The Books Of Judaism. There Are Many High Level Modern Yogis All Over (...)
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  37. Is Pain Modular?Laurenz Casser & Sam Clarke - 2022 - Mind and Language 38 (3):828-46.
    We suggest that pain processing has a modular architecture. We begin by motivating the (widely assumed but seldom defended) conjecture that pain processing comprises inferential mechanisms. We then note that pain exhibits a characteristic form of judgement independence. On the assumption that pain processing is inferential, we argue that its judgement independence is indicative of modular (encapsulated) mechanisms. Indeed, we go further, suggesting that it renders the modularity of pain mechanisms a default hypothesis to be embraced pending convincing counterevidence. Finally, (...)
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  38. The Problem of Psychotherapeutic Effectiveness.Steven James Bartlett - 1990 - Methodology and Science: Interdisciplinary Journal for the Empirical Study of the Foundations of Science and Their Methodology 23 (2):75-86.
    Hundreds of evaluative studies of psychotherapy still leave the issue of its effectiveness unsettled. The author argues that such studies have ignored the major determinant of therapeutic effectiveness, the role of a patient’s belief in the successful outcome in therapy. Psychiatrist Thomas Szasz, one of the foremost critics of psychiatry, wrote of this paper: "It is one of the best, if not the best, that I have read on this subject.” It makes little sense to claim that a certain therapy (...)
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  39. Modern Science VS Vedic Science.Subhendu Das - manuscript
    We will show with examples that all results of modern science are based on or derived from assumptions. Since assumptions cannot be valid for nature and engineering, modern science therefore cannot represent the nature, and be applicable to nature and engineering. For the same reason results of modern science can never be demonstrated. On the other hand the Vedic science is entirely based on observations, just like what Galileo observed. Vedic science does not therefore has any assumptions, and it is (...)
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