Research Papers On Placebos

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Gathered Information – Placebos
Giles La Ville 11nk

Medical experts rarely agree on the positive effects of placebos and whether they are the ultimate breach of doctor-patient confidentiality.
According to the survey, 97 percent of the participating doctors reported using an "impure placebo" at least once in their career. The survey also revealed that 12 percent of physicians admitted to distributing "pure placebos" to their patients.
Definition
A substance that has positive effects as a result of a patient’s perception that it is beneficial rather than as a result of a causative ingredient Fact:
#10 Placebo Also Occurs Amongst dogs (and other animals)
Pharmaceutical companies employ the same double blind procedures on Dogs when testing K9 medication as they do for human medications. They use two groups—in this particular study all dogs with epilepsy—and give one group the medication and the other group a placebo. It turns out the Placebo phenomenon transcends the human/dog continuum because the placebo group reacted extremely positively to the drugs.
#9 Antidepressants are (basically) a total sham
Depression undoubtedly sucks and there is no question about its relation to brain chemistry. However, in recent years doctors have been throwing around prescriptions for depression medications. This is because they seemingly work, curbing depression for a large percentage of those who take them. However, several high profile studies are showing that placebos basically do the same thing, minus the adverse side effects.
These findings are of course being downplayed by major pharmaceutical companies who would lose out on billions of dollars of profit if antidepressants become less popular. On the other hand, this is very promising news for those who suffer from mental illness because it essentially shows the manner in which these maladies are occurring in our heads and are wholly reversible without the help of nasty chemicals.
#8 Where You Live Affects Placebo
Americans tend to exhibit hypochondria more so than anyone else on earth, but who can blame us with the constant bombardment of medication advertisement on TV and in print? For some reason, we tend to assign a lot of power to drugs that can be injected into our veins (likely because we have been conditioned to respect the power of injections since birth). Europeans, on the other hand, react more positively to placebo pills than injections.
It would appear that cultural factors strongly influence the manner in which placebo effect manifests itself. Placebo drugs used in a trial for treating ulcers worked much better in Germany than in Brazil. However, a trial testing for hypertension drugs found that Germany was the least reactive to the placebo pills. These respective cultural factors are powerful in shaping our hopes, fears and expectations in a way that causes the placebo effect to morph when traversing borders.
#7 Placebo still works even though you know it’s a Placebo
The entire premise of the placebo effect that patients who believe are receiving real medicine, are cured. But, it turns out that even when patients find out they are receiving a sham drug, it still functions effectively which makes absolutely no sense whatsoever.
In trials where patients were being administered sham drugs, they are eventually told that the medication that they have been taking is a placebo. One would think that upon learning this, the positive benefits may diminish or at the very least weaken. On the contrary, the positive effects remain and many elect to continue taking the drug. In the future this could mean doctors will be prescribing sugar pills to patients who have full knowledge they are taking placebos.
#6 You can derive positive Placebo through fake infections of unrelated diseases
As far as experiments go, this one must have seemed pretty far-fetched to absolutely everyone involved. A group of doctors wanted to see if infecting people suffering from asthma with Hookworm would
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