Slashdot Mirror
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 have friends and relatives who get the Flu and run off to the doctor to get a prescription. I try to explain, that antibiotics won't help a viral infection but people just want to take a pill. It doesn't cost me any money for my time when I'm talking about it with them, but for a doctor time is money. He can lose money and potentially go out of business because every asshole who walks through the door wants or needs pills to feel better or he can just give them placebo and get on with his day.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
How can doctors get away with this? With the cost of medicine, how dare they make people go out and buy something they don't need. How about honesty and good bedside manner? Is that too difficult to provide outside of looking over a patient, writing out a prescription and charging 75 bucks for the visit?
Don't trust a bull's horn, a doberman's tooth, a runaway horse or me.
So sayeth the article. But I ask you, do the ethical challenges concern doctors fobbing patients off with placebos, or the existence of an environment where a doctor is afraid or unable to legitimately tell hypochondriacs that they are not sick and send them home?
May the Maths Be with you!
Antibiotics shouldn't be prescribed all willy-nilly. It just helps in the creation of super bugs.
For the love of non-antibiotic resistant tuberculosis, WHO are these doctors STILL giving out antibiotics when they don't need to? Is it not illegal for a doctor to prescribe medicine when it's not needed, and WHY AREN'T WE PUTTING THEM IN JAIL when they give out antibiotics for the cold etc? I know it must get annoying to deal with idiots asking for drugs they don't need, but that's your damn job, it's even more annoying if you get infected with superbugs you're making. Tell your patients that a spoonfull of sugar will cure them in aproximately 1 week if you absolutely need to give them something.
Seriously, it should be a felony to be giving out antibiotics when they're not needed.
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.
It occurs to me that killing half of all doctors might have unpleasant consequences for society.
...they don't even tell the patients that they are getting a placebo!!!
Vasectomies don't really make your little guys stop running around, they just make you think they're not supposed to anymore.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
It was most effective when prescriptions didn't state what the medicine was. Putting the identity of the medicine on the container has only been done for about 30 or 40 years.
My cousin was a pharmacist, and he had to be careful to charge the patient an amount that would be appropriate for a non-placebo prescription.
Placebos did the job. Some people expect to be given medication for ailments that aren't curable by medication. However, the placebo effect can apparently be powerful.
I hear there is a pill for that now.
Placebos have been proven to do good for a long time. So much that they must take the placebo effect into account when pharmaceutical companies want to test new products in order to make sure their new medicine is NOT simply a placebo.
What they do is that they compare the new drug being developped to a fake drug that has no effects. So, one group of testers take the real pills, the other group takes the fake pills. Of course, nobody knows if their own pill is real.
So if the new drug is having better health benefits than a placebo, the new drug is accepted and made into an official medicine.
If the placebo effect wasn't known to be effective, they would simply compare the effect of their new drug to a group that wouldn't be taking anything.
Nah, just a little bit off the top.
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.
..........FULL STOP.
The only time it is ethical to conduct a randomized controlled trial is when the outcome's risk or benefit is so unclear as to merit randomization.
To even run such a trial on cataract surgery vs placebo would be impossible due to the immediate and enormous differences between actual treatment and placebo; it may well be unethical, too.
I'm aware that anecdotes do not constitute evidence. But there's an enormous difference between taking some homeopathic remedy and "feeling better" (meanwhile thousands take them and feel nothing) and having a large and immediate success rate with something like lens replacement surgery for cataracts. Cataracts do not get better by themselves, not even with a placebo. Surgery to replace the clouded lens produces rapid and highly effective results.
To my mind, what you're saying is essentially like saying that the sun rising in the East because of the Earth's rotation is scientifically unproven because nobody has ever tried stopping the Earth's rotation to see if it actually changes anything.
I'll certainly grant that surgical procedures should be tested for validity and that there are some which do not have the desired effect or a success rate to justify performing them. But most surgeries correct blatantly obvious mechanical defects. Has anyone ever performed a scientific study on the effectiveness of replacing a worn-out car transmission? Have you ever doubted that a transmission replacement is effective when it's clear that the original transmission is broken?
If you mod me Overrated, you are admitting that you have no penis.
Antibiotics are NOT a placebo. In addition to the bacterial resistance problem, there are lots of potential nasty side effects with some antibiotics.