Tag: nocebo

Mr Hyde – The Dark Side of Placebo Effect

We hear very often about the benefits of auto-suggestion (a.k.a. placebos) in medicine, but much less about their risks and harms.

, / May 7, 2021

Statin Side Effects Revisited

Patients on statins frequently report muscle pain and other side effects, but controlled studies have shown side effects are not more frequent than with placebo. Why this discrepancy? A new study sheds some light.

/ January 19, 2021

A world-renowned placebo researcher asks, “Does placebo research boost pseudoscience?”

Professor Fabrizio Benedetti is the most famous and almost certainly also the most influential researcher investigating the physiology of placebo effects. In a recent commentary, he asks whether placebo research is fueling quackery, as quacks co-opt its results. The answer to that question is certainly yes. A better question is: How do supporters of science counter the placebo narrative promoted by quacks,...

/ September 23, 2019

A systematic review about nothing

There is dubious content in PubMed that you won’t find unless you look for it, or stumble across it inadvertently. It’s the entire field of alternative medicine which is abstracted and complied along with the actual medical literature. In this world, the impossible is accepted as fact, and journal articles focus on the medical equivalent of counting angels on pinheads. I’ve been...

/ June 30, 2016

Cure Is About Caring, Not Curing: Placebos, Alternative Medicine, and Patient Comfort

In a recent post, Dr. Gorski criticized two articles by Jo Marchant on placebos and alternative medicine. He mentioned that she had a book coming out and suggested I might want to review it. The title is Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body. I don’t know of any evidence that the mind has ever cured a disease, so...

/ January 26, 2016

“Mystery” Illness in Colombia

It looks like we can file this one under “here we go again.” A small town in Colombia, El Carmen de Bolivar, has seen more than 200 girls hospitalized with a mysterious illness since May of this year. The symptoms include dizziness, headaches, and fainting. So far, all of the girls hospitalized have been found to be healthy and were quickly released...

/ September 24, 2014

Mass Media Attention Psychogenic Syndrome – MMAPS

By now you have probably heard of the middle and high school children in LeRoy, NY who have come down with what some reports are calling a “mystery” illness. Of course it is almost obligatory to note in such stories that doctors or experts are “baffled.” There are several features of this story that are interesting from a science-based medicine and also...

/ February 1, 2012