Placebo Effect Hard to Swallow: Report

Monday, September 16th 2002

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The oldest trick in the doctor's bag - giving patients dummy pills to make them feel better - may have to be abandoned after scientists yesterday reported that the placebo effect is a myth.

Countless patients have been comforted by fake pills, believing they are real, or so doctors have long believed. The effect has been supposed to demonstrate the power of suggestion, until now.

Danish medical researches Dr Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Dr Peter Gotzche, writing in the New England Journal of Medicine, say they have analysed medical research over 45 years and concluded that the placebo effect does not exist.

If patients say they feel better after taking a dummy pill, it is most likely to be because they are feeling better.

The doctors, from the Nordic Cochran Centre in Copenhagen, an organisation which studies medical trails, analysed 114 published studies from 1946 to 1998 which used placebos, involving 7500 patients.

Dummy pills are used in medical research to measure the difference between patients receiving genuine medicine and patients improve simply because they are told they are being treated.

In each of the 114 studies analysed, there was a third group of patients who had not been given any pill at all and many of these also reported feeling better. Dr Hrobjartsson said any apparent placebo effect could be due to researchers seeing what they wanted to see, or patients trying to please the researcher.

Researchers had also failed to take into account the fact that diseases naturally wax and wane, he said. "The idea that placebo causes dramatic improvement in patients is a myth," said Dr Hrobjartsson. "There are just as many trials where there is a negative effect as where there is a positive effect."

Source New Zealand Herald September 2002

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