Tag Archives: Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter
Placebos in the Danish Daily Information: “Your Own Medicine”
[Translation]: The placebo effect has always had a bad reputation in modern medicine. It was pure imagination, calcium tablets and at most, proof that a product did not work. But now doctors, scientists, psychiatrists and psychologists are seeking to give it a new and better image. The placebo effect is there and it works, so why not find out how and use it?
PiPS Director Ted Kaptchuk on Minnesota Public Radio (MPR)
from MPR:
From performing acupuncture in a tiny Massachusetts clinic to directing the Program in Placebo Studies and Theraputic Encounters at Harvard, Ted Kaptchuk has worked to understand the placebo effect and its place in medicine. He joins us today to discuss his work and findings. Listen here.
PiPS Director Ted Kaptchuk on WBUR, Boston’s NPR Station
Demystifying The Power Of ‘The Placebo Effect’
from Radio Boston
Right here in Boston, in the heart of the city’s respected and centuries-old medical establishment, there’s a research center that is challenging long held views about how we treat illness, how we measure the effectiveness of treatment, and how the power of the mind — rather than drugs — can actually cure illness. We’re talking about new and controversial research into the so-called placebo effect. There’s growing evidence that placebos can actually help cure people, or at least make them feel better. If true, this could spark a major revolution in medicine, because traditionally placebos have had a bad name. After all, they’re usually a fake pill, nothing more than a bit of sugar, for example, designed to deceive people in clinical drug trials. But now there’s evidence that in some cases placebos — even when people knowingly take them — work just as well as real drugs and actually make people better. This has potentially enormous implications in the way we think about medicine, and how we understand the power of suggestion and belief in healing. The latest research on this comes from Harvard University and its newly created Program in Placebo Studies and The Therapeutic Encounter based at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. You could call this whole idea, The Power Of Nothing, which is the title of Michael Specter’s article in this week’s New Yorker about new research into the placebo effect. Guests: Ted Kaptchuk, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Listen here.