Browsing Tag

placebos

Medical Marketing: Is That REAL Pain?

Robert Burton of Salon wrote an interesting piece that discusses both the field of prescription drug marketing and how fMRI brain scans have been used to show that pain is "real." Fibromyalgia is a condition in which patients seem to…

Marketing and the Placebo Effect

We all know what the placebo effect is - give a group of patients a sugar pill instead of a medication with active ingredients, and some of them will show an improvement in their symptoms. Drug researchers treat the placebo effect as an…