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Home » Topics » placebo effect

Widespread placebo prescriptions prompt debate over the ethics of overmedication

["Young Woman Holding A Pill" on Shutterstock]

According to a recent study, doctors sometimes prescribe treatments they don’t have any evidence for. Is this ethical? Almost all UK GPs have at some point given a patient a treatment they don’t need. This is according to the results of a survey of 783 of them across the country,…

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Researchers: Subconscious cues can trigger the placebo effect

Placebo via Shutterstock

Subliminal information can trigger the placebo effect and its opposite, the nocebo effect, researchers say. The finding suggests that patients with certain ailments may feel better or worse depending on subtle cues their brains pick up from the environment, but which they are not consciously aware of. Karin Jensen, who…

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Placebos could reduce the side effects of drug treatments

Placebo by Triff via Sutterstock

Few of us would be happy to find out that we’d been prescribed a placebo. When we’re sick, we want real medicine. But what if the placebo was not intended to replace your medicine, but to work alongside it? That’s the rationale behind research into placebo-controlled dose reduction. Patients on…

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