Source: World Research Foundation
For decades, the gold standard of medical research has been the double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trial. You give one group of patients a medicine you want to test, and another group a dummy pill that has no active ingredients. Neither the patients nor doctors know who is getting which.
Placebo trials are used to tell researchers whether a tested drug has any healing effect beyond that which occurs a certain percentage of time when people take an inert pill. A patient's belief in a pill - a supposed medicine, but chemically innocuous - is thought to activate their body's healing powers.
I am fascinated that a major debate erupted when a group of doctors discussed the immoral and unethical aspects of utilizing a placebo. Their reasoning was that regular and beneficial medicine was being withheld from a patient.
The co-authors of an article addressing this topic, Kenneth Rothman, a Ph.D. From Boston University School of Public Health, and Karin Michels of Harvard School of Public Health, both stated that to give a patient a placebo, that has a 'known efficacy of zero,' was highly unethical.
Some other medical doctors and researchers have jumped into the debate stating that placebos are just a nuisance variable.
There has been sharp disagreement on this point, due to the fact that medical literature includes a great deal of testimony that the placebo effect routinely works 30 percent of the time, with Dr. Herbert Benson of Harvard stating that it may work up to 90 percent of the time.
Overlooked by its critics in this discussion, is the fact that studies that have utilized placebos have produced some rather remarkable, and at the same time unexplainable, results. Rather than looking at it as a nuisance, we should be looking at the placebo as a key to ascertain a remarkable phenomenon that seems to be a part of the human psyche.
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