Why include placebo treatments in your practice?

Placebos are not just a baseline arm in a double blind clinical study. Placebo treatments have been used widely in patient care for decades.

 
 

Reasons to offer open-label
placebos to your patients

 
 

  1. Research has shown patients can respond to placebo treatments even when they know they are receiving a placebo

  2. Placebos can be effective treatments with no side effects

  3. Patients using opioids for chronic pain can be conditioned to respond to placebo

  4. Many chronic conditions with nonspecific causes can respond to placebo

  5. Although patients respond differently to placebos, placebos are known to be effective across a growing number of conditions and can be 20% to 80% effective compared to standard care.

A survey of physicians in Germany and Switzerland reports more than 50% of those physicians surveyed use placebo treatments in their practice.

“Physicians should be made aware of the value of the placebo effect in the daily treatment of patients. Their use is of enormous importance for medical practice.”

— Christoph Fuchs, Chief Executive of the German Medical Association

 
 
 

Avoiding the Nocebo is not enough

 
 

Physicians avoid predicting a difficult recovery because they know patients are not statistics. They also know the nocebo effect can be magnified by the authority of a physician.

A few discouraging words from a physician can cause a patient to lose their expectation of healing. Using a gentle tone, laying of hands and encouraging the patient to follow a treatment,  are important tools, but patients who try placebo treatments can generate an expectation of healing, even when they know a placebo does not contain an active ingredient.

 
 
 

A prescribing physician's
guide to placebos to your practice

 
 

Howard Fields, MD PhD and University of California San Francisco have produced a series of YouTube video lectures, that provide physicians a scientific basis for including placebo treatments in your practice.

The six topic lecture series

    1. What is the placebo response?

    2. How do you study it?

    3. How effective is it?

    4. What are the psychological mechanisms?

    5. What are the neurological mechanisms?

    6. What are the ethical issues?