Placebo talks modern perspectives on placebos in society 1st Edition by Amir Raz,Cory Harris 9780199680702 0199680701

Part 1: Introduction

1. Introduction: placebos in modern society

1.1 Placebos in the twenty-first century

1.2 An interdisciplinary look at placebo use in society

1.2.1 The practitioner lens

1.2.2 The cultural lens

1.2.3 The placebo lens

1.3 Looking forward to placebo science

Part 2: The practitioner lens

2. Antidepressants and the placebo effect

2.1 Introduction

2.2 Listening to Prozac but hearing placebo

2.3 The emperor’s new drugs

2.4 The “dirty little secret”

2.5 How did these drugs get approved?

2.6 The myth of the chemical imbalance

2.7 Selective serotonin reuptake enhancers: the last nail in the coffin

2.8 Clinical conclusions

3. Active expectations: insights on the prescription of sub-therapeutic doses of antidepressants for depression

3.1 Introduction

3.2 The current state of affairs

3.3 Psychiatrist interviews

3.4 Discussion

3.5 Concluding thoughts

4. Justifying deceptive placebos

4.1 Introduction

4.2 The efficacy of placebo therapies

4.2.1 Are placebos necessarily deceptive?

4.2.2 Can the deceptive placebo be ethically justified?

4.2.3 Placebo deception as a special case

4.3 Constraints on the deceptive use of placebos

4.3.1 Other moral limits on placebo deception

4.4 Dealing with the discovery of deception

4.5 Placebos for depression

4.6 The ethics of charging money for inert therapies

4.7 Conclusions

5. Trust and the placebo effect

5.1 The meaning of placebos

5.2 “Trust me, I’m a doctor”

5.3 Trust and depression

5.4 Toward a science of trust in medicine

5.5 The biology of trust

5.6 Concluding remarks: from placebos to politics

6. Placebo science in medical education

6.1 Introduction

6.2 What are placebo effects?

6.3 A (brief) recent history of medical education in North America

6.4 Why medical students should learn placebo science: potential benefits and risks of placebos in the clinic

6.5 Ethical and philosophical considerations

6.6 The current state of placebo science knowledge

6.6.1 Physicians

6.6.2 Students: a Canadian case study

6.7 How can we integrate placebo science into medical education?

6.8 Closing remarks

Part 3: The cultural lens

7. Looking at placebos through a cultural lens and finding meaning

7.1 Introduction

7.1.1 Issues of meaning

7.1.2 Meaning is everywhere

7.2 The meaning response

7.2.1 Old treatments become less effective as new ones come along

7.2.2 Meaning responses occur throughout medicine, in surgery as well as in internal medicine

7.3 Variability in meaning response

7.3.1 Color

7.3.2 Form

7.3.3 Number

7.3.4 National cultural differences

7.3.5 Historical variation

7.4 Placebo dilemmas—meaning strikes back

7.5 The mind/body problem

7.6 Conclusions

8. Unpacking the placebo response: insights from ethnographic studies of healing

8.1 Introduction

8.2 Clinical and experimental epistemics of placebos

8.3 Varieties of placebo responding

8.3.1 Psychological mediation

8.3.2 Social mediation

8.4 Healing ritual as a placebo

8.4.1 Theories of ritual healing

8.4.2 The metaphoric mediation of healing

8.5 Placebos as ritual healing

8.6 Implications for clinical epistemology, ethics, and practice

8.7 Conclusion: embodiment, enactment, and the rhetorics of healing

9. Pills in a pretty box: social sources of the placebo effect

9.1 The influence of others

9.2 The placebo effect: early investigations

9.3 Contemporary applications

9.4 Placebos in fiction

9.5 Ambiguous potential

10. Healing words: the placebo effect and journalism at the mind–body boundary

10.1 Introducing “the placebo problem”

10.2 The woo, power and paradox of placebos

10.3 Science, health, and journalism

10.4 No longer “merely the placebo effect”

Part 4: The placebo lens

11. Placebolicious: the many flavors of placebos in Western diets and food cultures

11.1 Introduction

11.2 Placebos on the menu: a survey of placebos in diet and food culture

11.3 The list of ingredients: introducing the elements of the “total food effect”

11.3.1 Drug to food

11.3.2 Patient to consumer

11.3.3 Prescriber to source

11.3.4 Micro-context

11.3.5 Macro-context

11.3.6 Placebo drugs to placebo foods: limitations

11.4 The main course: integrating the elements of the “total food effect”

11.4.1 Source–consumer interactions

11.4.2 Source–food interactions

11.4.3 The patient-drug and consumer-food relationships

Pharmacology and metabolism

Nutrition

Flavor

Taste

Color

Shape and format

Quantity and size

Price and labels

Consumer experience

Second-hand knowledge

11.4.4 The impacts of the micro-context

11.4.5 The impacts of the macro-context

11.5 A sampling of desserts: three case studies

11.5.1 Case study 1: drug-like foods—alcohol and behavior

11.5.2 Case study 2: dairy and lactose intolerances

11.5.3 Case study 3: ceremonial foods—the host and Holy Communion

11.6 “Cheque please!”—closing remarks

12. Suggestion, placebos, and false memories

12.1 Introduction

12.2 The malleability of memory

12.3 Suggestions about what we have seen

12.4 Suggestions about what we have done

12.4.1 Imagination exercises

12.4.2 Corroboration

12.4.3 Social contagion

12.4.4 Implantation studies

12.4.5 Photographs and other visual aids

12.4.6 Feedback

12.5 Placebo suggestions

12.5.1 The placebo effect

12.5.2 Placebos and health

12.5.3 Placebos and social behavior

12.5.4 Placebos and non-social behavior

12.6 The placebo effect and susceptibility to misinformation

12.7 False memories and placebo effects

12.7.1 Individual differences in suggestibility

12.7.2 Ethical issues

13. Fetish as placebo: the social history of a sexual idea

13.1 Introduction

13.2 The biology of sexuality

13.3 Overlays: changes to biological orientations

13.4 Fetish as an overlay

13.5 Fetish and role playing in history

13.6 The fetish overlay upon the three great sexualities

13.7 Conclusion

14. “Take two and vote in the morning”: reflections on the political placebo effect

14.1 Introduction

14.2 Traditional perspectives on the placebo effect

14.3 New perspectives on placebos and the implications for politics

14.3.1 Mind–body interplay

14.3.2 The meaning effect

14.3.3 The question of ethics

14.4 The political placebo effect in practice

14.4.1 Populist protest politics

14.4.2 Harm reduction or immoral promotion?

14.5 Conclusion

Part 5: Concluding remarks

15. Placebos as social constructs to elucidate human behavior

15.1 Opening up the debate

15.2 The potential of placebos

15.3 The social role of placebos