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Laughter, the best medicine. As in, your doctor is laughing at you and giving you fake medicine just to get you to shut up. The U of C surveyed internists from U of C, Northwestern and University of Illinois at Chicago, and of the 233 doctors who responded, 48 percent said they'd given patients placebos, including "vitamins, herbal supplements, saline infusions, dummy pills and doses of medicine too low to be effective. One of the most common placebo treatments was giving antibiotics for viral infections that don't respond to antibiotics." Er, isn't that an awful idea? Taking antibiotics you don't need can make those antibodies ineffective when you do need them.
This may be obvious, but giving patients placebos and not telling them is against the AMA's rules. Also ethically unsound. Why are nearly half the doctors doing this? According to another study,
Doctors said placebos can calm a patient; supplement other treatments; satisfy a patient's unjustified demand for medication; control pain, etc. A few doctors said they give placebos just to get the patient to stop complaining.
Those...don't sound like terrific reasons.
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i think, if i were a doctor, i'd do that.
Totally. Placebos work.
Try 60mg of Placebonix today.
Totally. Placebos work.
Try 60mg of Placebonix today.
I'm down with using placebos, but prescribing REAL medication inappropriately is BS.
Mis-prescribing antibiotics aside, I feel for the doctors in this case. Faced with TV ads exhorting viewers to "ask your doctor about Fret-It-All" and the widespread of habit of Googling symptoms in pursuit of self-diagnosis, it can't be easy dealing with patients who insist they have the wasting disease of the week.
The last time I went to the doctor thinking I had an ungodly amount of infections in my head, my doctor told me that I had the "killer cold." I would have much preferred getting a prescription for vitamins.
Considering how people treat doctors and file complaints to their insurance company in excessive numbers when they are NOT given drugs. What is a physician supposed to do? "To do no harm" is the vow.
Lets see Medicare just dropped payments by 5% this month and will decrease them by 40% over the next 4 years. How many people stay in a career that keeps getting pay cuts, more paper work wher it takes 20 minutes of paper after seeing a patient for 6 minutes, and more frivilous law suits? Lets NOT talk about the direct advertising by all the new designer drugs that do the VERY same thing that it's competitor does for thrice the price.
Are vitimins placebos when they alieviate the issue? Sugar pills or chalk are true placebo for a study.
What about the ethics of 'journalists' who only gift one critical side of a story? Where is the obligation to report facts?
wait, are patients paying for placebos, or are these placebos just being handed out like samples? Because I better not be paying for sugar pills!
It is true that for placebos to work, the patient can't know they are placebos; therefore, that does go against the informed consent rule. I guess that would be the informed consent to refuse treatment??
Prescribing antibiotics for viruses is a terrible idea. I've had doctors tell me (after I stated this fact) that it was for "secondary infections." If a doctor tells me it's a cold, I will refuse antibiotics.
But if this practice continues, giving placebos to mollify patients, those doctors better damn well be sure there is really nothing wrong. Because if there really is an illness and the doc doesn't do anything, and it gets worse for the wait, there will be even more lawsuits being filed. So, uh, I guess everyone ought to save at least one pill for testing if you are in doubt... (unless it's an antibiotic for an infection you're pretty sure you have...then you need to take them all!!!)
I would be very interested to know whether these docs that give placebos give them more to women than men....
forestcats...did you pull that out of your ass?
Um....why is the picture used for this story a picture of ecstacy pills?
just curious....