Placebo treatments have been making people feel better for a long time. They've been working since long before Franz Mesmerwas run out of 18th-century Vienna for "mesmerizing" a young pianist into regaining her eyesight, after all hope for a medical cure had been lost.
Doctors have long dismissed the placebo effect as inferior to conventional medical treatments that sometimes fail where placebo works well, including insurgical procedures like arthroscopy, a popular procedure that relieves the pain of arthritic knees.
The placebo effect is triggered not by a magic pill, but through a combination of expectation, hope, and the strength of the doctor-patient relationship. Placebo is real; it's on the rise in America, and technology is allowing researchers to link placebo with physiological and psychological changes and genetic predisposition that could change the way we treat illness.
GUESTS:
- Gary Greenberg- Psychotherapist and the author of The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmasking of Psychiatry
- Ted Kaptchuk- Professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, and Director, Program of Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital
- Bruce Moseley - Orthopedic surgeon and sports medicine specialist, former team physician to the Houston Rockets, first to perform placebo surgery
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Colin McEnroe and Chion Wolf contributed to this show, which originally aired on December 1, 2015.
