The placebo response is a real psychological, physiological, and ultimately statistical phenomenon that can be a powerful therapeutic tool in the world of medicine, especially when it comes to chronic pain conditions. For a drug to be approved, its developers must be able to demonstrate that it is significantly more effective compared to a placebo....
For hundreds of years, the medical community has known that the mere act of receiving treatment, even if it’s just a sugar pill, can improve a patient’s symptoms. Therefore, in order to ensure that the effects of an experimental treatment are real, most randomized controlled trials (RCTs) include a placebo arm. Placebos are most often...
This is the fifteenth and final installment of our look at the increasingly high placebo response that is plaguing clinical trials in analgesia and psychiatry. Read the rest of the posts in the series here. As our Placebo Problem series draws to a close, we conclude by taking a brief look at three ethical issues...
This is the fourteenth installment of our look at the increasingly high placebo response that is plaguing clinical trials in analgesia and psychiatry. Read the rest of the posts in the series here. The term “placebo” first took hold in an unlikely place: funerals. Placebo, Latin for “I shall please” first came into use in...
This is Part Two of our series on the increasingly high placebo response that is plaguing clinical trials in analgesia and psychiatry. Read the other parts here. Analgesic and psychiatric drug development is facing an enormous problem: rising placebo responses in randomized controlled trials (RCTs) threaten the ability of pharmaceutical companies to successfully identify novel...
Pain is a significant health problem that impacts quality of life and imparts high costs to society. Despite intense research effort and progress in our understanding of the mechanistic and molecular basis of pain, there have been few real breakthroughs in novel analgesic drug development over the past 50 years. One major obstacle to the...