The Power of Placebo

Placebos are medicines or procedures that don't have any active medical ingredients. Their effects are all in your mind, but the brain has wonderful ways of making us feel better. eMedExpert Blog looks at the latest research on the placebo effect. Did you know there's such a thing as placebo surgery?

In the 1950s, many physicians treated angina with ligation of the internal mammary artery. Despite claims of up to a 91% success rate, in the late 1950s, two skeptics conducted separate double-blind tests in which half the patients received skin incision, but not artery ligation12-13. In both studies, the placebo surgery proved equally effective as the ligation. And the overall rate of improvement with the placebo was 37%.

A 2002 study of arthroscopic knee surgery found that the outcomes for a placebo procedure were as good as those of the “real” surgery14.

Link -Thanks, Karen!

(image credit: Flickr user Akácio S. [ /photographyk ])

When i was in residency, we had a patient who in the hospital for a 'health issue'. it turned out that this patient was addicted to opiates and went into withdrawals because the patient's 'health issue' was not a pain problem so this patient was not getting pain medications. We mitigated the withdrawal by giving her morphine low dose, but this patient kept asking for it. this went on and on for the entire time of this patients treatment. The attending physician instructed the staff to substitute normal saline for the morphine in a tapering fashion. eventually the patient was only getting injections of saline. And the patient would still demand the 'morphine' and the patient got on and on about how the 'morphine' was great for the patient's pain and how much pain they were in if the 'morphine' wasnt on time.