A big fat placebo

A friend of mine, who works as doctor, told me that doctors were banned from prescribing placebos (and not telling them they are placebos) because of the ethical issues surrounding it.

However, I recently decided to verify the fact and it turns out it isn’t true. In fact an article on BBC News shows that 97% of doctor’s had admitted to prescribing a placebo at least once in their career.

This raises interesting questions for alternative medicine. Is there room for treatments that provide the proven clinical benefit of placebo even if that is all it is?

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This entry was posted on Saturday, June 6th, 2015 at 10:46 am and is filed under Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.