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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 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
Antibiotics shouldn't be prescribed all willy-nilly. It just helps in the creation of super bugs.
How can doctors get away with this?
They're "getting away" with it because frequently it's in the best interest of their patients.
With the cost of medicine, how dare they make people go out and buy something they don't need.
They don't *make* people go out and do anything.
Most likely, people go to the doctor and expect to walk away with a prescription. The doctor has two choices:
1. give them a placebo, and tell them what to do to really fix the problem (bed rest or more exercise, as applicable to the situation.)
2. explain to them that a pill won't fix anything, and what they need to do to fix the problem.
If the doctor tells them 1, the patient walks away happy.
If the doctor tells them 2, the patient resents the doctor and ignores the advice about what to do to really get healthy.
How about honesty and good bedside manner?
Honesty and good bedside manner don't go very far when people are told by big pharmaceutical companies that there is a pill to cure everything.
If placebos didn't work, then doctors wouldn't prescribe them. I guess the better question is how can we give people placebos without them realizing it's a placebo? I don't personally agree with giving out antibiotics as placebos. The trick is, with the internet, deceiving your patients is getting pretty hard.
Antibiotics shouldn't be prescribed all willy-nilly. It just helps in the creation of super bugs.
Depending on age, 14% to 30% of patients either skip doses or do not finish their regimen of antibiotics.
That is much more worrisome than the over prescription of antibiotics, because when someone sick doesn't finish their meds, you know that whatever is leftover gets stronger.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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.