My interest arose out of my early work on the placebo effect in chronic pain.
Snorting Adderall right before a test might raise scores because of a placebo effect.
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The placebo effect could thus be attributed to a lifetime of being conditioned to believe in medicine.
Unlike their conventional counterparts, practitioners of alternative medicine often excel at harnessing the placebo effect, says Dr Ernst.
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"It might just be the placebo effect or marketing, but it tastes crisper, " said Ngo, who lives in Miami.
Any difference in task performance, then, would be analogous to a placebo effect.
Many devices don't have to prove their mettle against a sham, even though surgeries themselves can have a placebo effect.
More recent trials mainly include outpatients many with milder depression and so more likely to feel the placebo effect.
This process, he points out, is fundamental to the widely accepted " placebo effect, " which is created by a hopeful outlook.
And a lot of what people think of as the placebo effect is just the natural tendency of people to improve.
Too few of them have been rigorously compared to a fake operation to prove it is not all a big placebo effect.
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See also this great 2009 Wired piece on how drug companies are struggling with the placebo effect, by Steve Silberman.
That is hardly the same as saying there is some mysterious mind-body placebo effect that could help treat all sorts of everyday ailments.
And that's without even considering the possible placebo effect, the idea that the psychological boost of believing in the bands can improve performance.
Maybe it's a placebo effect, but I think I'm more efficient, more focused, and it adds a little spice to an otherwise lonely profession.
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The story of Natrecor highlights the enormous impact of the placebo effect, the power the expectation improvement to influence patients subjective assessment of symptoms.
If you get all jazzed up about a mysterious placebo effect, that positive thinking may help you feel even slightly better on subjective scales.
Harvard researcher Ted Kaptchuk trained for five years in traditional Chinese medicine, but then became one of the leading researchers into the placebo effect.
Much of the placebo effect seen in clinical trials is the combination of the natural tendency of patients to get better and measurement error.
German surgeon Michael Haake, who led the BMJ study, argues that the apparent benefits of the heel procedure are nothing more than a placebo effect.
It was probably a placebo effect but it certainly was testosterone.
The key with the placebo effect is the expectation of improvement.
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One problem is that surgery can have an enormous placebo effect, masking a reality of meager benefits in exchange for the risk and cost it entails.
There is something to be said for the placebo effect, and for some conditions, it appears to work whether a patient believes it will or not.
Pain is notoriously responsive to placebo effect and some researchers believe surgery and other complex interventions may produce may produce the biggest placebo improvement of all.
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Many more of these substances are not providing much more of a benefit other than acting as placebos, although the placebo effect in athletes is very strong.
Or maybe a treatment will have "a placebo effect, " meaning it will make you feel better just because you have confidence it will make you feel better.
Fabrizio Benedetti, professor of neurophysiology at the University of Turin Medical School, Italy, warned that dopamine may not be the only chemical involved with the placebo effect.
And consider the role perception plays in helping patients improve in ailments ranging from pain and depression to Parkinson's disease through a phenomenon known as the placebo effect.
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While the exact mental state that allows the placebo effect to kick in remains a mystery, the belief that something will work seems to be a necessary ingredient.
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