Tag Archives: Technology

PLACEBO AND FAKE SURGERY

Two thought-provoking articles relating the placebo effect to ‘sham surgery’, which has been canvassed in these pages previously.

In this meta-study, the authors point out that ” the literature is not chock full of studies comparing a surgical procedure to placebo. While the study of a drug versus placebo is standard practice, the picture changes radically when the placebo is a sham operation involving incisions and anesthesia …  Of about 3000 articles, 53 full-text articles were selected. They represented randomized controlled studies, with both an active intervention and a placebo arm involving a sham procedure. The authors defined a surgical outcome based on three elements:

•    The critical surgical component – the anatomic changes felt to result in a therapeutic effect

•    Placebo component – the patient’s expectations

•    Non-specific effects – changes in the natural history of an illness that might impact the outcome, the experience of being in a hospital, interactions with staff – the multitude of other factors.

In this study, the author admits that sham (placebo) srugery already occurs. Because it can work.

How?

“How can sham surgeries work? Bigness. In the same way that placebo pills and other modalities make people get better, the clinical evaluation, workup, stress and travel of surgery day, surgical prep, etc. all make for an almost unbeatable set of placebo-instituting conditions. And with some of the data which exist, sham surgeries perform better in the patients’ minds than a drug treatment that’s a comparator for the same condition.