Half of American Doctors Often Prescribe Placebos

damn_registrars writes "'Half of all American doctors responding to a nationwide survey say they regularly prescribe placebos to patients. The results trouble medical ethicists, who say more research is needed to determine whether doctors must deceive patients in order for placebos to work.' The study just quoted goes on to say that the drugs most often used as placebo are headache pills, vitamins, and antibiotics. Studies on doctors in Europe and New Zealand have found similar results."

Comments

Not placebo

[pls2917]

As the article points out, prescribing e.g. antibiotics is not truly placebo (something totally inert). Rather, they are looking for the placebo effect by prescribing something that's a real drug but not expected to help with the ailment in question.

This is a crap study and Title is WRONG

[spineboy]

First of all, they polled internist and Rheumatologists, many of whom were treating patients with fibromyalgia. Rheumatologists often wind up treating patients that no one can figure out why they "hurt", and thus often get patients with psychosomatic illnesses. Fibromyalgia is a diagnosis that patients state they hurt in many different places in their body, and no test, MRI or CT scan can show anything wrong. These patients often have depression, and the problem is usually best treated with anti-depressant type medications.
So the population of doctors sampled in this study is not typical at all of a normal population of doctors anyway.
"Headache"pills, or anti-inflamatories, are quite useful in relieving body aches and pains, and to call them a placebo is just plain wrong. Just go tell the patient with bad bone on bone osteoarthritis that the pill really doesn't do anything, and see how wrong you are. They really work very well.
Surgeons often do peer review their procedures - at least orthopaedic ones The journals are filled with articals every month describing how well, or how poorly a technique works.