Placebos
eBook - ePub

Placebos

  1. English
  2. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

About this book

The power of placebos to ameliorate symptoms has been with us for centuries. Western medicine today is finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the efficacy of placebos. In some clinical trials with placebos as controls, inert or sham replicas of active pharmaceutical drugs and even sham surgeries have been found to be as beneficial as the intervention being tested. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Hall examines the power of placebos, showing how their effects can influence our clinical trials, clinical encounters and, collectively, Hall argues, our public health.

Hall, who has studied the placebo effect for years, reviews the history of the placebo in medicine, tracing its evolution from quackery and patent medicine to its use as a control in clinical trials. She considers the ways that expectations and learning affect our response to placebos; advances in neuroimaging that reveal the inner workings of the placebo effect; the "nocebo" effect; placebo controls in randomized clinical trials; and the use of psychological profiles and genetics to predict individual placebo response. The effects of placebos have been hiding in plain sight; with this book, Hall helps bring them into clearer view.

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Yes, you can access Placebos by Kathryn T Hall in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicine & Alternative & Complementary Medicine. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Contents
  3. Series Foreword
  4. Introduction: The Back Door
  5. 1 Placebos: A Brief History
  6. 2 How Expectations and Conditioning Shape Placebo Effects
  7. 3 The Brain on Placebos
  8. 4 Nocebo Effects in Modern Medicine
  9. 5 Placebos in Clinical Trials
  10. 6 The Placebo Effect in Surgery
  11. 7 Who Responds?
  12. 8 Placebo Redux
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Glossary
  15. Notes
  16. Further Reading
  17. Index