The Placebo Effect : An Interdisciplinary Exploration

Cumbreland, Rhode Island, U.S.A.: Harvard Univ Pr. New. 1999. Paperback. 067466986x .*** FREE UPGRADE to Courier/Priority Shipping Upon Request *** - *** IN STOCK AND IMMEDIATELY AVAILABLE FOR SHIPMENT - FLAWLESS COPY, PRISTINE, NEVER OPENED -- 272 pages; clean and crisp, tight and bright pages, with no writing or markings to the text. -- TABLE OF CONTENTS: Introduction * 1 The Placebo: Is It Much Ado about Nothing? * 2 Clinical Reflections on the Placebo Phenomenon * 3 The Nocebo Phenomenon: Scope and Foundations * 4 The Doctor as Therapeutic Agent: A Placebo Effect Research Agenda * 5 Toward a Neurobiology of Placebo Analgesia * 6 The Contribution of Desire and Expectation to Placebo Analgesia: Implications for New Research Strategies * 7 The Role of Conditioning in Pharmacotheraphy * 8 Specifying Nonspecifics: Psychological Mechanisms of Placebo Effects * 9 Placebo, Pain, and Belief: A Biocultural Model * Placebo: Conversations at the Disciplinary Borders * Contributors * Index 254. -- DESCRIPTION: A mere "symbol" of medicine-the sugar pill, saline injection, doctor in a white lab coat-the placebo nonetheless sometimes produces "real" results. Medical science has largely managed its discomfort with this phenomenon by discounting the placebo effect, subtracting it as an impurity in its data through double-blind tests of new treatments and drugs. This book is committed to a different perspective-namely, that the placebo effect is a "real" entity in its own right, one that has much to teach us about how symbols, settings, and human relationships literally get under our skin. * * FS REVIEW: This book perpetuates the farce of the placebo effect, one of the last fictions in the field of psychology still uncritically and universally accepted. What fuels these massive frauds, including the field of psychology itself, that overwhelm the entire intellectual effort of entire generations, cause incalculable harm, and yet persist? -- with a bonus offer-- .