Author : Richard Kradin
Publisher : Routledge
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 38,89 MB
Release : 2011-04-27
Category : Business & Economics
ISBN : 1135913102
Placebo responses are automatic and unconscious and cannot be predicted on conscious volition. Instead, they reflect complex interactions between the innate reward system of the nervous system and encoded procedural memories and imaginal fantasies. This book contributes therapeutic effects, varies in potency, and exhibits its own pathologies.
Author : Erik Vance
Publisher : National Geographic Books
Page : 290 pages
File Size : 36,64 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Medical
ISBN : 1426217897
National Geographic's riveting narrative explores the world of placebos, hypnosis, false memories, and neurology to reveal the groundbreaking science of our suggestible minds. Could the secrets to personal health lie within our own brains? Journalist Erik Vance explores the surprising ways our expectations and beliefs influence our bodily responses to pain, disease, and everyday events. Drawing on centuries of research and interviews with leading experts in the field, Vance takes us on a fascinating adventure from Harvard's research labs to a witch doctor's office in Catemaco, Mexico, to an alternative medicine school near Beijing (often called "China's Hogwarts"). Vance's firsthand dispatches will change the way you think--and feel. Expectations, beliefs, and self-deception can actively change our bodies and minds. Vance builds a case for our "internal pharmacy"--the very real chemical reactions our brains produce when we think we are experiencing pain or healing, actual or perceived. Supporting this idea is centuries of placebo research in a range of forms, from sugar pills to shock waves; studies of alternative medicine techniques heralded and condemned in different parts of the world (think crystals and chakras); and most recently, major advances in brain mapping technology. Thanks to this technology, we're learning how we might leverage our suggestibility (or lack thereof) for personalized medicine, and Vance brings us to the front lines of such study.
Author : Kathryn T Hall
Publisher : MIT Press
Page : 218 pages
File Size : 44,42 MB
Release : 2022-10-04
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0262371022
The biological power of the placebo effect. The power of placebos to ameliorate symptoms has been with us for centuries. Western medicine today is finding it increasingly difficult to ignore the efficacy of placebos. In some clinical trials with placebos as controls, inert or sham replicas of active pharmaceutical drugs and even sham surgeries have been found to be as beneficial as the intervention being tested. In this volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Kathryn Hall examines the power of placebos, showing how their effects can influence our clinical trials, clinical encounters and, collectively, Hall argues, our public health. Hall, who has studied the placebo effect for years, reviews the history of the placebo in medicine, tracing its evolution from quackery and patent medicine to its use as a control in clinical trials. She considers the ways that expectations and learning affect our response to placebos; advances in neuroimaging that reveal the inner workings of the placebo effect; the “nocebo” effect; placebo controls in randomized clinical trials; and the use of psychological profiles and genetics to predict individual placebo response. The effects of placebos have been hiding in plain sight; with this book, Hall helps bring them into clearer view.
Author : Walter A. Brown
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 188 pages
File Size : 41,90 MB
Release : 2013-01-17
Category : Health & Fitness
ISBN : 0199933855
The Placebo Effect in Clinical Practice brings together what we know about the mechanisms behind the placebo response, as well as the procedures that promote these responses, in order to provide a focused and concise overview on how current knowledge can be applied in treatment settings.
Author : David A. Jopling
Publisher : Oxford University Press, USA
Page : 333 pages
File Size : 29,50 MB
Release : 2008-05-29
Category : Medical
ISBN : 0199239509
Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticisms throughout their history. In this book David Jopling argues that the changes achieved through therapy are really just functions of placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers. It is a bold new work that delivers yet another blow to Freud and his followers.
Author : Daniel E. Moerman
Publisher :
Page : 172 pages
File Size : 10,79 MB
Release : 2002
Category : Healing
ISBN :
Author : Jo Marchant
Publisher : Text Publishing
Page : 369 pages
File Size : 44,27 MB
Release : 2016-01-27
Category : Science
ISBN : 1922148725
A rigorous, sceptical, deeply reported look at the new science behind the mind's extraordinary ability to heal the body. Have you ever felt a surge of adrenaline after narrowly avoiding an accident? Salivated at the sight (or thought) of a sour lemon? Felt turned on just from hearing your partner's voice? If so, then you've experienced how dramatically the workings of your mind can affect your body. Yet while we accept that stress or anxiety can damage our health, the idea of 'healing thoughts' was long ago hijacked by New Age gurus and spiritual healers. Recently, however, serious scientists from a range of fields have been uncovering evidence that our thoughts, emotions, and beliefs can ease pain, heal wounds, fend off infection and heart disease, even slow the progression of AIDS and some cancers. In Cure, award-winning science writer Jo Marchant travels the world to meet the physicians, patients and researchers on the cutting edge of this new world of medicine. We learn how meditation protects against depression and dementia, how social connections increase life expectancy, and how patients who feel cared for recover from surgery faster. We meet Iraq war veterans who are using a virtual arctic world to treat their burns and children whose ADHD is kept under control with half the normal dose of medication. We watch as a transplant patient uses the smell of lavender to calm his hostile immune system and an Olympic runner shaves vital seconds off his time through mind-power alone. Drawing on the very latest research, Marchant explores the vast potential of the mind's ability to heal, acknowledges its limitations, and explains how we can make use of the findings in our own lives. ‘A thought-provoking exploration of how the mind affects the body and can be harnessed to help treat physical illness, by an award-winning science journalist.’ Best Books of 2016, Australian Financial Review ‘A thought-provoking exploration.’ Best Books of 2016, Economist
Author : Anne Harrington
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 276 pages
File Size : 14,13 MB
Release : 1999
Category : Chemotherapy
ISBN : 9780674669864
Beginning with a review of the role of placebos in the history of medicine, this book investigates the current surge of interest in placebos, and probes the methodological difficulties of saying scientifically just what placebos can and cannot do.
Author : Jeremy Howick
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 317 pages
File Size : 14,82 MB
Release : 2023-11-14
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1421446391
The history, philosophy, ethics, and science behind the placebo and nocebo effects. Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. Thousands of studies show that they can be effective and make us happier and healthier. Yet confusion about what placebos are and how to measure their effects prevents some doctors from using them to help patients. Meanwhile, damage caused by the nocebo effect—the negative effect of expecting something bad—is not widely recognized. In The Power of Placebos, Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos and nocebos based on more than twenty years of research and data from over 300,000 patients. This book, the culmination of that research, offers practical ways for researchers, policymakers, and doctors to put placebo and nocebo research into practice to improve health outcomes. In addition to providing an overview of placebos and nocebos and explaining how belief systems and context can create physiological effects in the body, Howick advocates for a number of controversial positions, including why it may be unethical to include placebos in most clinical trials in which there are already established therapies and why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices. Howick also underscores the importance of the therapeutic effects of interactions between health care practitioners and patients, in the context of care. The Power of Placebos dispels the confusion surrounding placebos and paves the way for doctors to help patients by enhancing placebo effects and avoiding the pitfalls of nocebos.
Author : Arthur K. Shapiro
Publisher : JHU Press
Page : 443 pages
File Size : 25,75 MB
Release : 2000-10-17
Category : Psychology
ISBN : 1421401347
Ranging from antiquity to modern times, this history of the placebo effect is especially timely in light of renewed interest in the mind-body relationship. Until this century, most medications prescribed by physicians were pharmacologically inert, if not harmful. That is, physicians were prescribing placebos or worse without knowing it. In a sense, then, the history of medical treatment until relatively recently is the history of the placebo effect. Based on the authors' lifelong study and clinical research, this is a comprehensive and scholarly examination of the placebo effect. The authors begin by surveying the use of placebos from antiquity to modern times. They also examine the development, use, and validity of the double-blind, controlled clinical trial. And they present their own study of the placebo effect in more than 1000 patients. Demonstrating both the magnitude and the limitations of the placebo effect, the book helps to clarify knotty issues ranging from the evaluation of therapies to the ethics of conducting controlled studies in which patients are deliberately given placebos. With the renewed interest in the mind-body relationship as well as in the role of placebos in new and alternative medical procedures and therapies, the findings of this book are especially timely.
