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Friday, December 31, 2010

Medical News: Placebo Effect Is Real, Not Attempt to Deceive - in Pain Management, Pain Management from MedPage Today


Medical News: Placebo Effect Is Real, Not Attempt to Deceive - in Pain Management, Pain Management from MedPage Today

The placebo effect works -- even when the patient knows it's a placebo -- demonstrating that it is a 'ritual of medicine' and not an attempt to fool patients, according to the results of a small randomized clinical trial.

In the trial of 80 irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients, those who took an open-label placebo showed clinically meaningful -- and statistically significantly -- higher global improvement scores and reduced symptom severity compared with those who got the same physician attention but didn't pop a placebo pill, Ted J. Kaptchuk, OMD (Doctor of Oriental Medicine), of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard, and colleagues found.

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