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Bibliographic Essay
This essay begins by listing general references on the placebo response. It then proceeds to indicate, chapter by chapter, the sources of information and quotations. Each citation begins with an italicized phrase, which is the passage from the text at the place where the citation is mentioned or is relevant.
General: Books and Articles About the Placebo Response
A number of books, which vary widely in content and approach, have appeared about the placebo response since the 1970s.
A book which is not devoted solely to the placebo response, strictly speaking, but which deserves mention as a frequently quoted classic, is Jerome D. Frank, Persuasion and Healing (revised edition, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973). Frank devotes one chapter to the placebo response. His main concern is to show what the various schools of psychotherapy have in common, and to argue that these shared elements are much more responsible for the success of psychotherapy than any individual technique prized by one school or another. The placebo response, as we define it in this book, is one of those common elements. Many of the healing strategies we discuss in chapters 12 through 16 are at least hinted at, if not specifically mentioned, by Frank.
Jefferson M. Fish, Placebo Therapy (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973), also focuses on the placebo response in psychotherapy. Fish is one of the first to offer an expansive definition of “placebo effect” to cover almost every aspect of human interaction within the healing environment. He emphasizes (in a way similar to Jerome Frank) how psychotherapy can heal in part by harnessing the faith of the patient and by employing powerful rituals of healing.
Michael Jospe, The Placebo Effect in Healing (Lexington, MA: Lexington Books/D.C. Heath, 1978), also focuses on the placebo response as a psychological phenomenon and draws mainly on work by psychologists. It does contain a good review of what was known about the placebo effect at the time.
My own Placebos and the Philosophy of Medicine: Clinical, Conceptual, and Ethical Issues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), says more about theories of the mind-body relationship than anyone besides a philosopher would like to know. It does, however, introduce some of the key ideas in this book—the importance of symbols for understanding the impact of the placebo on the mind; why one should define placebo response independently of placebo; and the meaning model.
Placebo: Theory, Research, and Mechanisms, edited by Leonard White, Bernard Tursky, and Gary E. Schwartz (New York: Guilford Press, 1985), remains the meatiest technical compendium of data and analysis about the placebo effect, featuring twenty-five chapters and 447 pages. It takes an interdisciplinary approach, including work by physicians, philosophers, psychologists, anthropologists, pharmacologists, and others. The last chapter is the editors’ comprehensive model of how these approaches must be consolidated in order to truly understand the placebo response. While much important research has been done since this book was published, it is still a valuable reference.
Howard M. Spiro, Doctors, Patients, and Placebos (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), is written by a physician and consequently focuses on the placebo response in clinical practice as well as in research. I find this volume somewhat inconsistent. In the earlier chapters Dr. Spiro tends to take a skeptical view of many of the claims made for the placebo effect. He insists upon a distinction that I find fallacious, arguing that the placebo is capable of changing subjective feelings of patients, but not of changing any objective measures of bodily function. (My chapter 9 explains to some extent why modern neuroscience would reject any subjective/objective distinction of this sort.) His later chapters, by contrast, are a very sensitive presentation of the placebo response as an aid to the humane and compassionate physician-patient relationship. His key bit of concluding imagery is to contrast the eye and the ear. Modern medicine has enshrined the eye, hoping to learn the truth by gazing at the body either directly or through technology like X rays. But, Spiro says, the placebo needs the ear. Human listening needs to be restored as a critical part of medicine. Spiro revised and expanded his discussion in a later volume, The Power of Hope: A Doctor’s Perspective (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998).
Non-Specific Aspects of Treatment, edited by Michael Shepherd and Norman Sartorius (Lewiston, NY: Hans Huber Publishers, 1989), a publication of the World Health Organization, is essentially a collection of five essays, representing the disciplines of philosophy of science, experimental psychology, clinical pharmacology, psychotherapy, and clinical psychiatry. Thus Shepherd and Sartorius continue the strategy begun by White, Tursky, and Schwartz of studying the placebo response from an interdisciplinary point of view.
This same strategy is continued in The Placebo Effect: An Interdisciplinary Exploration, edited by Anne Harrington (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). The volume grew out of a conference held in 1994 at Harvard, and includes both formal papers by participants and also some of the give-and-take discussion in between. The papers in this book are uniformly of very high quality and extremely thought-provoking.
Arthur K. Shapiro and Elaine Shapiro, The Powerful Placebo: From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), summarizes the life’s work of one of the most prolific modern writers on the placebo effect, psychiatrist Arthur Shapiro. Sadly, Dr. Shapiro died before the book was completed, and the volume seems to be more a collection of his previous articles on the placebo effect than a comprehensive reanalysis. Dr. Shapiro, like Dr. Spiro, apparently felt toward the end of his life that more claims were being made for the placebo effect than could be scientifically validated.
While this volume is not easily available, I have benefited from reading the doctoral thesis Placebos and Placebo Effects in Clinical Trials, by Ton de Craen (Department of Clinical Epidemiology and Biostatistics, University of Amsterdam, 1998). Many of the individual chapters have been published in medical journals and will be cited.
One recent book, The Placebo Response: Biology and Belief in Clinical Practice, a collection of essays edited by D. Peters (London: Churchill Livingstone, 1999), became available too late for me to review for this volume.
During this same time period, there have been a great number of review articles about the placebo response in medical journals and other technical publications. What follows is a selected rather than complete list.
One of the very first such articles, and one we shall refer back to often below, is Henry K. Beecher, “The Powerful Placebo,” Journal of the American Medical Association 159:1602–1606, 1955.
Other valuable articles include Stewart Wolf, “The Pharmacology of Placebos,” Pharmacological Review 2:689–704, 1959; Arthur K. Shapiro, “The Placebo Response,” in Modern Perspectives in World Psychiatry, edited by J.G. Howells (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1968), pp. 596–619; Henry R. Bourne, “The Placebo—A Poorly Understood and Neglected Therapeutic Agent,” Rational Drug Therapy 5(11):1–6, 1971; Herbert Benson and Mark D. Epstein, “The Placebo Effect: A Neglected Asset in the Care of Patients,” Journal of the American Medical Association 232:1225–1227, 1975; Alfred O. Berg, “Placebos: A Brief Review for Family Physicians,” Journal of Family Practice 5:97–100, 1977; Henry R. Bourne, “Rational Use of Placebo,” in Clinical Pharmacology: Basic Principles in Therapeutics (second edition), edited by Kenneth L. Melmon and Howard F. Morrelli (New York: Macmillan, 1978); Arthur K. Shapiro and Louis A. Morris, “The Placebo Effect in Medical and Psychological Therapies,” in Handbook of Psychotherapy and Behavior Change: An Empirical Analysis (second edition), edited by S.L. Garfield and A.E. Bergin (New York: Wiley, 1978), pp. 369–419; Vernon Min Sen Oh, “Magic or Medicine? Clinical Pharmacological Basis of Placebo Medication,” Annals of the Academy of Medicine (Singapore) 20:31–37, 1991; and Judith A. Turner, Richard A. Deyo, John D. Loeser, Michael Von Korff, and Wilbert E. Fordyce, “The Importance of Placebo Effects in Pain Treatment and Research,” Journal of the American Medical Association 271:1609–1614, 1994.
In 1994, The Lancet published a series of articles on the placebo response in its Volume 344. These included D. Mark Chaput de Saintonge and Andrew Herxheimer, “Harnessing Placebo Effects in Health Care,” pp. 995–998; K. B. Thomas, “The Placebo in General Practice,” pp. 1066–1067; Alan A. Johnson, “Surgery as a Placebo,” pp. 1140–1142; Joan-Ramon Laporte, “Placebo Effects in Psychiatry,” pp. 1206–1209; and Jos Kleijnen, Anton J.M. de Craen, Jannes van Everdingen, and Leendert Krol, “Placebo Effect in Double-Blind Clinical Trials: A Review of Interactions with Medications,” pp. 1347–1349.
An excellent comprehensive review, which I shall refer to numerous times, is by Seymour Fisher and Roger P. Greenberg, “The Curse of the Placebo: Fanciful Pursuit of a Pure Biological Therapy,” in the book edited by these two authors, From Placebo to Panacea: Putting Psychiatric Drugs to the Test (New York: Wiley, 1997). This book takes the stance that most drugs commonly used today in psychiatry cannot be shown, upon careful investigation, to be any better than placebos. Regardless of what one thinks of this controversial thesis, their review of what is known about the placebo response is impressive.
Several articles on the placebo effect have appeared at intervals in Scientific American; see for instance Louis Lasagna, “Placebos,” Scientific American 193 (July, 1956):68—71; and Walter A. Brown, “The Placebo Effect,” Scientific American, Volume 278, Number 1, January 1998, pp. 90–95. Norman Cousins contributed “The Mysterious Placebo: How Mind Helps Medicine Work,” to the Saturday Review, October 1, 1977, pp. 9–16. Psychology Today has printed good reviews of the placebo response; see for example Frederick J. Evans, “The Power of the Sugar Pill,” Psychology Today 7 (April 1974):55–59. An excellent recent assessment of current placebo research is Sandra Blakeslee, “Placebos Prove So Powerful Even Experts Are Surprised,” New York Times, Science section, pp. 1–4, October 13, 1998.
Introduction: The Power of the Mind
xiv Danielle has just had surgery to remove her gall bladder: While this example may seem fanciful, one scientific study looked at healing after surgery as a function of the view out the patient’s window: Roger S. Ulrich, “View Through a Window May Influence Recovery From Surgery,” Science 224:420–421, 1984.
Chapter One: What Is the Placebo Response?
1 “One of the most successful physicians”: The quotation is from The Writings of Thomas Jefferson, edited by P. L. Ford (New York: Putnam, 1898), Vol. IX, p. 78–85.
2 Mr. Wright, Krebiozen, and the Newspaper Headlines: The story of Mr. Wright appears in Bruno Klopfer, “Psychological Variables in Human Cancer,” Journal of Projective Techniques 21:331–340, 1957.
3 Ruth’s Rose Perfume: This case was published by Karen Olness and Robert Ader, “Conditioning as an Adjunct in the Pharmacotherapy of Lupus Erythematosus,” Journal of Developmental and Behavioral Pediatrics 13:124–125, 1992.
4 The Importance of Listening: Martin J. Bass, Carol Buck, Linda Turner, et al., “The Physician’s Actions and the Outcome of Illness in Family Practice,” Journal of Family Practice 23:43–47, 1986.
4 Bass and colleagues also identified a large group: The Headache Study Group of the University of Western Ontario, “Predictors of Outcome in Headache Patient...
