Word: effects
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While the exact mechanism of the placebo effect is still unknown, researchers have discovered and elaborated upon the power of expectations. Not surprisingly, the U.S. pharmaceutical industry is familiar with the concept. In 2004, it spent $23 billion on marketing, crafting an image of safety, health, and well-being through television and print ads as well as the aggressive pursuit of trusted doctors and health-care professionals. Indeed, the positive effects of many modern medical treatments including cough medicines, antibiotics in the case of some infections, and the majority of back and arthroscopic surgeries have been proven...
Harnessing the placebo effect does not seem a particularly easy, or even feasible, task: beating the best of 200 years of scientific discovery, invention, and insight with just inert sugar. But the evidence remains embarrassingly clear that the placebo effect is real—and more important than we may care to admit. A recent article in Wired magazine explained the trend: “From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent.” And 50 percent...
...case this seems disturbing news, know this—new treatments are not getting weaker; instead, the placebo effect is actually growing stronger. Drugs like Prozac have flunked follow-up studies on effectiveness when the placebo effect literally doubled in size. And the most comprehensive reviews of antidepressant medications have revealed that the placebo effect has grown significantly stronger since the 1980s...
What the growing placebo effect shows is not so much the failure of modern medicine as much as the success of the modern production of beliefs. The modern health-care narrative is so firmly entrenched that it needs no introduction. You are sick; you visit the doctor; he diagnoses the illness; he prescribes the appropriate medication; you get better. Often this process, and not the actual treatment, cures us with its normality. This is why 55 percent of Chicago doctors have prescribed a placebo treatment to their patients...
...government should see this as a sign that advertising works and duly subsidize or commission media campaigns targeted at lesser-known, cost-effective drugs. Even better, it should support new types of treatments, bringing their effectiveness into public consciousness and increasing the placebo effect associated with them. But even more importantly, the government should extend the provisions for research on the comparative effectiveness of different treatments and of different treatments against a placebo. We should be pleased that placebos provide these opportunities for saving money to use in health care—now we must pursue them...