The activity I chose to write about was on Dr. Walter A. Brown's article in Scientific American about placebos and their effect on the patients. His article described what a placebo is and if it is ethical for doctors to prescribe this "treatment" to their patients.
Dr. Brown, who is a psychologist at Brown University, decided to do a study on the effects of a placebo. A placebo is any treatment or drug with no medicinal value that is given to a patient to relieve symptoms of an ailment. His hypothesis in the article focused on if the placebos had any effect on the patients who took them.
To test his hypothesis, Dr. Brown and his colleagues performed experiments on patients who had depression. To test his idea, he employed what is known as the "double blind technique." This type of experimentation involves that nei
In his experiments on the placebos, he found that the placebo can make a
about 76% felt better, however, in those only with incision, a whopping 100% success rate was accomplished. These findings, which were done before Browns', simply show the repeatability of these types of experiments.
All of the aforementioned studies show one thing, the placebo effect. Those patients who benefited from the placebo drugs and operations were actually benefiting from themselves. They believed in their own minds that they felt better causing the body to react in similar fashion. This is what Dr. Brown set out to find. Was he successful? Yes, he was. He concisely showed that patients truly benefit from taking a placebo because they believe in the sugar pill which allows them to believe in themselves. Both of these put together cause the body react acco
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