FLICKR, MICHAEL CHENPlacebo treatments have long been known to cause “spurious” improvement, and for this reason have posed a constant challenge to clinical trials designed to demonstrate a drug’s efficacy. And a study published last week (January 8) in Science Translational Medicine adds another wrinkle to the story: even if migraine sufferers knew they were taking an inactive treatment, according to their own notes the placebo still elicited significant pain relief, as compared with taking nothing at all.
As many researchers have pointed out, just because improvement was caused by a sugar pill doesn’t make it invaluable. A placebo “helps stimulate the healing response,” bioethicist Howard Brody of the University of Texas told The Globe and Mail, and improvement is improvement, after all. But it’s hardly ethical to give a patient a placebo but tell him it’s a real drug. Though this hasn’t stopped all doctors from lying to their patients (in fact, more than half of American doctors admitted to giving their patients “placebos” like vitamins or unnecessary antibiotics in a 2008 survey published in the BMJ), the new study suggests that physicians may not have to lie about it for a placebo to be effective.
The research, led by Harvard University’s ...
