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New
studies prompt change in approach to placebo effect
Aug. 26, 2002
By STACEY BURLING
Knight Ridder Newspapers
When Daniel Moerman’s back begins hurting, he reaches
for a bottle of Advil, but he pauses a moment to look
respectfully at the pills and talk to them before swallowing
them.
“You
are the best pills in the world,” the University of
Michigan-Dearborn anthropologist tells them. “This pain
is going to go, and I’m only going to need two, not
three.”
He pauses again to think about the medicine spreading
through his body before he washes the two pills down
with a glass of water.
What Moerman is attempting to do — and he says it works
— is use the placebo effect to make his Advil work better.
“I
believe that belief makes a difference and so I enhance
my belief,” said Moerman, a large man who routinely
needed three pills before he began these little talks,
not the two that Advil suggests. He pointed out that
a study found patients given real pain medicine reported
more relief when they saw the doctor injecting it than
when it was given secretly by IV.
Moerman’s approach to his Advil marks a significant
change in how researchers think about placebo, said
Arthur Kleinman, a psychiatrist who teaches medical
anthropology and psychiatry at Harvard University.
Most people still think of placebos as sugar pills —
actually, they’re usually made of milk powder — that
doctors give test subjects to measure the “real” effects
of a drug they’re studying. Some people get the drug,
some the placebo. The difference between the two is
the effect of the drug. The rest is commonly known as
the “placebo effect.”
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