Source: www.preventdisease.com | Original Post Date: January 9, 2014 –
There’s no doubt that many medications work in the short-term to suppress symptoms. In fact, that’s all they do as they are incapable of addressing the underlying cause of disease. But even when a medication works, half of its impact on a patient is due to one aspect of the placebo effect: the positive message that a doctor provides when prescribing the treatment, according to a new study.
Much of medicine is based on what is considered the strongest possible evidence: The placebo-controlled trial. The problem is that this foundation upon which much of medicine rests, has no standard.
The thinking behind relying on placebo-controlled trials is this: to be sure a treatment itself is effective, one needs to compare people whose only difference is whether or not they are taking the drug...
