Ethics

Placebo Deception in the WSJ

By Adam Kolber

Sally Satel has an essay in Friday's Wall Street Journal entitled, "It's All in Your Head".  The piece discusses recent research finding that doctors prescribe placebo treatments surprisingly often.  Though they do not often prescribe placebos like sugar pills or saline solutions, they often prescribe so-called impure placebos where a medication that has some specific effects (like antibiotics or vitamins) is used in a situation where the doctors does not expect the treatment to have any specific effect on the patient's condition.  Rather, the doctor hopes that the treatment will have a placebo effect.

She references my law review article on the topic in the third-to-last paragraph.  You can download the law review article here.

Full post as published by Neuroethics and Law on November 17, 2008 (boomark / email).