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

Re:This is a crap study and Title is WRONG

[wamerocity]

One of the professors at my med school gave a presentation that these psychosomatic problems of fibromyalgia are anything but. She summed up her research showing what happens if you tie a string around the dorsal root of one of the spinal nerves (the sensory part) which caused incredible pain. The string dissolves in a few weeks and they measured how long it takes for the pain to subside. They would measure the pain by touching the paw of the rat with a very small probe to see how much pressure it would take before it would lift its foot (or the pain became too much). Even using the largest gauge (smallest probe) the rat would lift its paw, but gradually it would allow more pressure as time went on the the string dissolved.

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.