Word: placebo
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...many doctors are unconvinced by the blitz. The Medical Letter, a highly regarded bulletin for physicians, notes that in one published study of 66 obese patients, the greatest weight loss was achieved not by anyone on PPA but by someone who had been given a placebo. Says Letter Consulting Editor Dr. Martin Rizack: "If somebody really wants to lose weight, you can give them almost anything and probably get an effect...
...account for the placebo's magic, doctors have resorted to virtually every kind of psychological and physical explanation. No luck. Drs. Jon D. Levine and Howard I. Fields and Oral Surgeon Newton C. Gordon, all of the University of California in San Francisco, may have hit upon an answer. In an experiment involving dental patients having molars extracted, they gave them either a placebo or the drug naloxone, which is known to block the effects of endorphin, a morphine-like pain reliever produced by the brain itself...
...guard against any unwitting influences on the patients or themselves, the doctors did not know which "drug" was being used in any particular case until the end of the test. In the first phase of the experiment, patients who had received placebos experienced less pain than those in the naloxone group. But when the experiment was continued, patients initially in the placebo group but now getting the blocker experienced an increase in pain. In other words, the placebo response diminished. Levine's explanation: somehow placebos apparently activate a body pain-relieving system that relies on endorphin. Says he: "Placebos...
Perhaps so. But Psychiatrist Arthur K. Shapiro of Manhattan's Mt. Sinai Medical Center points out that the placebo effect may also be influenced by attitudes of patient and doctor toward drugs and, perhaps more important, toward each other. In fact, says Shapiro, who has collected hundreds of the "useless" nostrums over the years, patient confidence in a physician may be a kind of placebo too, increasing chances of improvement...
...experienced by practitioners of Transcendental Meditation, he has recently reviewed studies of patients suffering from angina, a severe chest pain related to heart disease. He found that when physicians were initially enthusiastic about a remedy, even if it later proved worthless by ordinary medical definition, it acted as a placebo in about 80% of all cases. Conversely, Benson says, flaws in the patient-doctor relationship may account for some of the equally puzzling unpleasant effects, including nausea, dizziness and pain itself, experienced by some people who have taken placebos...