Nelson Vergel
Founder, ExcelMale.com
For millennia, doctors, caregivers, and healers had known that sham treatments made for happy customers. Thomas Jefferson himself marveled at the genius behind the placebo. “One of the most successful physicians I have ever known has assured me that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, powders of hickory ashes than of all other medicines put together,” Jefferson wrote in 1807. “It was certainly a pious fraud.”
These days, placebo — Latin for “I shall please” — is much more than a pious fraud.
As Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard, who is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on placebo, put it to me in a recent interview, the study of the placebo effect is about “finding out what is it that’s usually not paid attention to in medicine — the intangible that we often forget when we rely on good drugs and procedures. The placebo effect is a surrogate marker for everything that surrounds a pill. And that includes rituals, symbols, doctor-patient encounters.”
Excellent article
These days, placebo — Latin for “I shall please” — is much more than a pious fraud.
As Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard, who is regarded as one of the world’s leading experts on placebo, put it to me in a recent interview, the study of the placebo effect is about “finding out what is it that’s usually not paid attention to in medicine — the intangible that we often forget when we rely on good drugs and procedures. The placebo effect is a surrogate marker for everything that surrounds a pill. And that includes rituals, symbols, doctor-patient encounters.”
Excellent article
