This article is raises a very interesting question. Is it morally right for a doctor to lie to a patient if the doctor knows that the lie will help the patient improve? A doctor's oath is to help...
This article is raises a very interesting question. Is it morally right for a doctor to lie to a patient if the doctor knows that the lie will help the patient improve? A doctor's oath is to help the ill, not to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but I'm not sure how I feel about my doctor lying to me.
Say someone has stage four cancer. Would it be better to give them an accurate prediction of their time left so they could be informed and spend it wisely, or tell them they will live longer than likely in the hope that placebo would actually make that happen?
You don't need to lie to the patient: As a more nuanced point I'm not even sure that it's lying if the pill will actually help the patient, probably gets a bit grey if the patient starts asking...
You don't need to lie to the patient:
You don’t even have to deceive the patients. You can hand a patient with irritable bowel syndrome a sugar pill, identify it as such and tell her that sugar pills are known to be effective when used as placebos, and she will get better, especially if you take the time to deliver that message with warmth and close attention. Depression, back pain, chemotherapy-related malaise, migraine, post-traumatic stress disorder: The list of conditions that respond to placebos — as well as they do to drugs, with some patients — is long and growing.
As a more nuanced point I'm not even sure that it's lying if the pill will actually help the patient, probably gets a bit grey if the patient starts asking what the pill is made of, but again effectiveness seems more related to the ritual and the 'warmth' of the care provided, along with the presence of genes that dictate the levels of COMT which seems to indicate receptiveness to a placebo effect.
It's different from the case that you mentioned, but there was a really interesting article recently that talks about this kind of debate in relation to dementia patients. A lot of them constantly...
It's different from the case that you mentioned, but there was a really interesting article recently that talks about this kind of debate in relation to dementia patients. A lot of them constantly forget about things like their spouse being dead—is it better to repeatedly put them through the pain of telling them, or just humor them and say that they're at work right now?
I wonder if a pill you could just buy could really be effective as a placebo, they mention a few times the importance of a ritual in activating the effect. Would be interesting in seeing research...
(...) the fact that there is no money in sugar pills and thus no industry interest in the topic as anything other than a hurdle it needs to overcome.
I wonder if a pill you could just buy could really be effective as a placebo, they mention a few times the importance of a ritual in activating the effect. Would be interesting in seeing research that looks at the effectiveness of a self administered placebo. I get pretty bad headaches sometimes, just from personal experience I have noticed that the strength/dosage of a painkiller does not really change the short term level of relief, kind of absurdly I will almost instantly feel better after taking it. So I've just taken to purchasing the off brand really low dosage stuff and taking one, maybe two or three if it's really bad, but that's still barely half the dosage a doctor prescribes. I would not mind a well packaged and coloured placebo pill, really sell it's effect.
(...) the placebo effect seems to be becoming stronger as time goes on. (...) patients in the United States, one of only two countries where medications are allowed to be marketed directly to consumers, have been conditioned to expect greater benefit from drugs (..)
And if she is correct that a certain ensemble of neurochemical events underlies the placebo effect, then what is to stop a drug company from manufacturing a drug — a real drug, that is — that activates the same process pharmacologically?
This is really an absurd scenario but it kind of makes sense when you consider that not everyone is equally receptive a placebo. I could see it being used as part of a mix of drugs, given to patients with high COMT and so less responsive to placebo.
(...) the placebo effect may raise enough mischief to make Kaptchuk rue its return, and bewilder patients when they discover that their doctor’s bedside manner is tailored to their genes.
This feels pretty futuristic, I would be damn impressed if medicine was so advanced. And how good would it be if you could find out if you've got low COMT, it suddenly makes any form of alternative medicine that fits your world view far more attractive when there is evidence that it can have concrete beneficial effects.
This article is raises a very interesting question. Is it morally right for a doctor to lie to a patient if the doctor knows that the lie will help the patient improve? A doctor's oath is to help the ill, not to tell the truth and nothing but the truth, but I'm not sure how I feel about my doctor lying to me.
Say someone has stage four cancer. Would it be better to give them an accurate prediction of their time left so they could be informed and spend it wisely, or tell them they will live longer than likely in the hope that placebo would actually make that happen?
You don't need to lie to the patient:
As a more nuanced point I'm not even sure that it's lying if the pill will actually help the patient, probably gets a bit grey if the patient starts asking what the pill is made of, but again effectiveness seems more related to the ritual and the 'warmth' of the care provided, along with the presence of genes that dictate the levels of COMT which seems to indicate receptiveness to a placebo effect.
It's different from the case that you mentioned, but there was a really interesting article recently that talks about this kind of debate in relation to dementia patients. A lot of them constantly forget about things like their spouse being dead—is it better to repeatedly put them through the pain of telling them, or just humor them and say that they're at work right now?
It's a very long article, but I thought it was a really interesting read: The Comforting Fictions of Dementia Care
I wonder if a pill you could just buy could really be effective as a placebo, they mention a few times the importance of a ritual in activating the effect. Would be interesting in seeing research that looks at the effectiveness of a self administered placebo. I get pretty bad headaches sometimes, just from personal experience I have noticed that the strength/dosage of a painkiller does not really change the short term level of relief, kind of absurdly I will almost instantly feel better after taking it. So I've just taken to purchasing the off brand really low dosage stuff and taking one, maybe two or three if it's really bad, but that's still barely half the dosage a doctor prescribes. I would not mind a well packaged and coloured placebo pill, really sell it's effect.
This is really an absurd scenario but it kind of makes sense when you consider that not everyone is equally receptive a placebo. I could see it being used as part of a mix of drugs, given to patients with high COMT and so less responsive to placebo.
This feels pretty futuristic, I would be damn impressed if medicine was so advanced. And how good would it be if you could find out if you've got low COMT, it suddenly makes any form of alternative medicine that fits your world view far more attractive when there is evidence that it can have concrete beneficial effects.