Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: “Pickle ash” and “high blood”
- Part I The meaning response
- Part II Applications, challenges, and opportunities
- 7 Psychotherapy: placebo effect or meaning response?
- 8 The neurobiology and cultural biology of pain
- 9 “More research is needed”: The cases of “adherence” and “self-reported health”
- 10 Other approaches: learning, expecting, and conditioning
- 11 Ethics, placebos, and meaning
- Part III Meaning and human biology
- References
- Index
11 - Ethics, placebos, and meaning
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- List of tables
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: “Pickle ash” and “high blood”
- Part I The meaning response
- Part II Applications, challenges, and opportunities
- 7 Psychotherapy: placebo effect or meaning response?
- 8 The neurobiology and cultural biology of pain
- 9 “More research is needed”: The cases of “adherence” and “self-reported health”
- 10 Other approaches: learning, expecting, and conditioning
- 11 Ethics, placebos, and meaning
- Part III Meaning and human biology
- References
- Index
Summary
I haven't mentioned it very often, but there are many ethical issues which people routinely raise about placebos. This has been a perennial problem in medicine, I think. The primary problem is that, historically at any rate, when doctors really didn't know what to do for a patient, or simply didn't have any treatment which they thought might be effective, they often gave people inert drugs: bread pills, sugar pills, whatever. In a famous passage from a letter to a physician in 1807, Thomas Jefferson wrote: “One of the most successful physicians I have ever known, has assured me, that he used more bread pills, drops of colored water, & powders of hickory ashes, than of all other medicines put together. It was certainly a pious fraud.” Jefferson is forgiving, but he does credit this action to be a “fraud,” even if a “pious” one. That the use of placebos seems somehow “fraudulent” is a serious problem for medicine.
The case of the Kwakiutl shaman
One of the great cases, which raises many important issues, can be found in anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss' famous paper “The Sorcerer and his Magic” (Levi-Strauss 1967b). In it, Levi-Strauss analyzes the case of Quesalid, a Kwakiutl Indian from Vancouver Island in British Columbia, a case originally reported a generation earlier by Franz Boas (Boas 1930). Quesalid had reason to believe that the shamans were cheats and frauds, shamelessly exploiting their patients with trickery.
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- Information
- Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect' , pp. 127 - 130Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002