Word: painful
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...work in clinical trials, it is the sugar pill, along with its close cousin, the sham treatment. The placebo, as such inert and cost-free remedies are known, can relieve depression as effectively as Prozac, ease discomfort as effectively as acupuncture, and reduce as much disability and back pain as a widely used vertebral surgery that costs...
...been known, but the mechanism behind them is still largely a scientific mystery. The standard explanation is that we are just fooling ourselves. In Latin, placebo means "I shall please," which suggests that the placebo effect is just a fleeting mind trick - that the mere suggestion of pharmacologically induced pain relief humors the body into temporary recovery. In trials, every drug response is in fact assumed to be at least partially due to the placebo effect. But the confounding thing about the benefits of the placebo is that the effect is often not beneficial...
...nocebo effect. (The term nocebo is also from Latin, this time from the infinitive nocere, "to do harm.") A nocebo response occurs when the suggestion of a negative effect of an intervention leads to an actual negative outcome. When doctors tell patients that a medical procedure will be extremely painful, for example, they tend to experience significantly more pain than patients who weren't similarly warned. And in double-blind clinical trials of antidepressants, even those participants receiving a sugar pill report side effects like gastrointestinal discomfort if investigators have warned them at the outset that those effects are likely...
Despite the pain of recent economic turmoil, German voters resoundingly reiterated their faith in the free market during the country's Sept. 27 national elections. A victory by Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservative Christian Democratic Union puts the party on track to form a new center-right coalition with the smaller Free Democratic Party, whose leader, Guido Westerwelle, is likely to be tapped as Vice Chancellor. Merkel's previous coalition partner, the left-leaning Social Democratic Party, suffered its worst election loss since World War II. Merkel and Westerwelle are expected to cut taxes, promote business and strengthen Germany...
...convey the truth of a soldier's life in a place like that, your pictures have to delineate a wide range of experience, from pain and grief and anxiety to loneliness, mischievousness and sheer boredom. The images have to find an equilibrium between the war zone as a place of jangling danger and abrupt violence and the war zone as the temporary quarters of young men far from home who are simply trying to get through the day with some semblance of normality. There will be blood, but there will also be mealtimes, horseplay and video games. Recall...