文章基本信息

标题：The Myth of the Placebo Effect
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作者：Nick Barrowman
期刊名称：The new Atlantis: A Journal of Technology & Society
印刷版ISSN：1543-1215
电子版ISSN：1555-5569
出版年度：2016
期号：48
出版社：Ethics and Public Policy Center
摘要：I n 1955 Dr. Henry Beecher, an anesthesiologist at Harvard Medical School, published a landmark paper in the Journal of the American Medical Association , “ The Powerful Placebo .” The article is remarkable for the claims it made, for its wide influence, and for its profound flaws. Beecher had been studying placebos — pharmacologically inert treatments, such as pills with no active ingredient — and reviewed evidence from fifteen clinical trials in which the effectiveness of real treatments to reduce subjective patient-reported outcomes, for instance pain, nausea, and anxiety, was tested by comparing them to placebos. Beecher concluded that, overall, in 35 percent of cases the condition was “satisfactorily relieved by a placebo,” which he took to be evidence of therapeutic effectiveness. He also discussed a few studies finding objective effects of placebos, such as the production of gastric acid and increased adrenal cortical activity. Because the effect seemed to occur more or less equally in a variety of conditions, Beecher inferred that “a fundamental mechanism in common is operating.”