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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."
I was going to post exactly that. Good job.
Although, they do give sugar pills sometimes at the hospital. Also, people, don't forget that this placebo effect actually HELPS the patient to recover more quickly.
Everyone does it. Even the medics sometimes use little tricks. They have 3 or 4 to save lives. I know of one: If you are extremely nervous and are almost hyperventilating, they give you a mask and tell you to breath the oxygen... yet they never open their bottle. The patients immediately calm down after that...
The medics never wanted to tell me the other tricks since they might eventually use them on me to save my life.
How can doctors get away with this?
Posting anonymously because this is kinda embarrassing, but I have suffered a bout of hypochondria recently. I'm not the type of person who runs to the doctor with every illness, and I have, in fact, gone for 5-6 years without doctor's visits (I'm in my mid-20's and in pretty good health, so I feel I can skip the check-ups).
Well, this all changed when I got some abdominal pains. Went to the doctor, he ran tests for the dangerous stuff, nothing was found. Then he ran tests for the more common stuff, nothing was found. He sent me home with instructions to wait a week to see if it got better, or to return earlier if it got worse. Naturally I got pissed off, because I was still in pain, and felt like I needed to do some research to see what it could be. I hit webmd.com
Fucking bad idea. As I found symptoms that matched mind, and read about the additional symptoms that came with the diseases, I actually started feeling the new symptoms. So I went back to the doctor with them. More tests were made, nothing was found, I would do more 'net research, start getting worse with new symptoms again, go back to the doctor run more tests, find nothing again. Eventually I realized what was happening, and calmed the fuck down. All the symptoms disappeared within a week, but not before I spent a few thousand dollars in deductibles and went through the literal pain in the ass of a colonoscopy as a 20-something year-old for no reason whatsoever.
This type of hypochondria is something medical students go through, and is something you can expect more of the general population to go through now that we all have access to things like webmd.
So when you show up at a doctor's office, and the doctor eliminated the possibility that you need urgent medical attention, and can't find anything wrong with you...there's some value to the patient in just prescribing a cheap placebo and calming him down.
How about honesty and good bedside manner?
When drug manufacturers stop spending millions on advertising campaigns to convince patients that the latest and greatest drug (which is really exactly the same as the generic but with added ibuprofen or whatever) is essential, doctors might start getting honest information from their patients about what they really need.
About fifteen years ago, looking at med school as an option, I did work experience with a doctor. It was cold season. 95% of his patients were there because they had little more than a cold and a desire to stay home from work. He told me to watch. For the first five minutes he would do everything in his power to just give them the treatment they really needed. After that, if not satisfied, he'd write them a prescription for exactly the same thing but with a more impressive name, that they'd have to buy over the counter, that would cost them twice as much as the off the shelf for exactly the same thing.
The first five minutes they were pissed. What did he mean, he didn't think they needed a prescription?! That off the shelf drug couldn't possibly help someone as sick as them. They were angry. They were outraged.
Then he agreed with them, admitted he was wrong, that he'd underestimated and was going to write them a prescription for a new drug that's just come on to the market. With an impressive new name, essentially a reformulation of what he'd been trying to give them, they left happy.
Honesty and a good bedside manner are worth slightly less than zero when people are bombarded by dozens of commercials a day telling them how only the drug with the obviously happier people, with the cool smiling bumble bee, and the blisteringly fast side-effects in 0.001 point text can really make everything OK.
The problem was in elderly rats, they found that the pain didn't go away after the string dissolved. On top of that, they found that even though there was nothing sending the signal to the spinal chord to signal pain, after the rats reached a certain age, the spinal chord would still continue to send the signals to the brain even though there was no original pain stimulus. I.E. The spinal chord was creating a pain stimulus without a cause. A dorsal rhizotomy didn't fix it, pain medication helped for a bit (but like all pain meds became ineffectual over time. People with fibromyalgia don't have pain because they depressed, if anything it's the other way around - they are depressed because they are often in agonizing pain.
The paper will be published pretty soon. I'll post a link later if anyone cares.
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