What Placebos Teach Us about Health and Care

Placebo effects raise some fundamental questions concerning the nature of clinical and medical research. This Element begins with an overview of the different roles placebos play, followed by a survey of significant studies and dominant views about placebo mechanisms. It then critically examines the concept of placebo and offers a new definition that avoids the pitfalls of other attempts. The main philosophical lesson is that background medical theories provide the ontology for clinical and medical research. Because these theories often contain incoherent and arbitrary classifications, the concept of placebo inherits the same messiness. The Element concludes by highlighting some impending challenges for placebo studies.

• Publication year

  2023

• Venue

  Unknown venue

• Publication date

  2023-09-26

• Fields of study

  Not labeled

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1017/9781009085496
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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