Placebo Effect essays

Placebo Effect essays Medicines that are prescribed to patients can commonly have several effects. Some of the depend directly on medicines pharmacological action; others may have a psychological effect that readily cures or relieves the symptoms troubling the patient, though they may not have any actual pharmacological action. This is known as the placebo effect. The word placebo comes from the Latin verb placere which means, to please Or, placebo is any treatment devoid of any specific actions on the patients symptoms or diseases that somehow can cause an effect upon the patient. The placebo effect is a much-debated phenomenon in medicine. This paper will consist of three topics of discussion. First, what are the two categories of illness to be considered when discussing the placebo effect? Second, what does Pavlovs Theory have to do with the placebo effect and how it relates to stress-induced illnesses. Third, how does the placebo effect relate to the patient/doctor relationship? Does the placebo effec t have the same validity when measured against serious illnesses that typically respond to chemical treatments (such as cancer, Aids, and other bacterial or cellular diseases) as when measured against stress-induced illnesses or symptoms such as asthma, migraine headaches, or blood-pressure/heart conditions? When debating the effectiveness of the placebo effect, consideration must be given to two types of illnesses that car or cannot be affected. They are: stress-related illnesses such as hypertension, asthma, high blood-pressure, migraine and other types of headaches etc. versus genetically environmentally caused illnesses such as Cancer, Aids, heart disease, diabetes, etc. The stress related illnesses are said to show that when the placebo effect works it does so in 7 to 64 % of cases; however, the result are not the same when treating more serious illnesse...