Placebo: Is It right we talk about it?

摘要

If laypersons or even health care professionals discuss special patients and their special treatments, they often say: "I know someone, where this or that helped". But is it the real specific effect of therapy they talk about or is it just a placebo? A placebo (from Latin placebo, "I shall please" or from placebo, "I please") is a simulated or otherwise medically ineffective treatment for a disease or other medical condition intended to deceive the recipient. Sometimes patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition, a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect. Placebo effects can last for a long time: over 8 weeks for panic disorders, 6 months for angina pectoris, and 2.5 years for rheumatoid arthritis. Placebo effects, after verbal suggestion for mild pain, can be robust and still exist after being repeated 10 times even if they have no actual pharmacological pain killing action. The extent of the placebo effect differs in the literature depending on the condition from 0 up to 80% [3]. Notably, there are some treatments, particularly in the large field of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM), which rely mostly on the placebo effect, e.g., homeopathy (Figure 1) [1]. Placebos are not just pills, they come in many disguises. Treatments which are currently deemed to be effective may be abandoned tomorrow, if new data demonstrates their ineffectiveness.