“The Powerful Placebo”
“The Powerful Placebo”
This chapter studies the role of placebo in medicine. As a product of postmodernist medicine, the placebo had undermined the positivist model of biomedicine by interjecting subjectivity, uncertainty, and ambiguity into the clinical encounter. However, in the 1955 article, “The Powerful Placebo,” Henry Beecher suggested that placebos could work through physiological and biochemical mediators to the point of exceeding the effects of an active pharmacological drug, a hypothesis that challenged the very definition of the placebo as an unreal or inert identity. The advances in research regarding placebo led to the discovery of endorphins, which have opiate-like properties with the potential to alter pain perception, mood and respiration, and the identification of two specific factors that were deemed essential for its action: a suitable disease and a mutually supportive relationship between the physician and the patient.
Keywords: placebo, postmodernist medicine, biomedicine, Henry Beecher, The Powerful Placebo, endorphins
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