Understanding Placebo and Nocebo Responses for Pain Management

Nonconscious activation of placebo and nocebo pain responses.

The dominant theories of human placebo effects rely on a notion that consciously perceptible cues, such as verbal information or distinct stimuli in classical conditioning, provide signals that activate placebo effects. However, growing evidence suggest that behavior can be triggered by stimuli presented outside of conscious awareness. Here, we performed two experiments in which the responses t...

Pain, placebo, and nocebo: epistemic, ethical, and practical issues.

The Power of Expectation – Understanding the Placebo and Nocebo Phenomenon

Although placebo pills are supposed to have no pharmacological activity, people taking placebo pills describe a variety of positive (i.e., placebo phenomenon) and negative (i.e., nocebo phenomenon) reactions. This has major clinical implications. Placebo reactions account for a substantial part of improvement when treating patients with hypertension, mental disorders, and even after surgical pr...

New Insights into the Placebo and Nocebo Responses

In modern medicine, the placebo response or placebo effect has often been regarded as a nuisance in basic research and particularly in clinical research. The latest scientific evidence has demonstrated, however, that the placebo effect and the nocebo effect, the negative effects of placebo, stem from highly active processes in the brain that are mediated by psychological mechanisms such as expe...

Placebo and nocebo in interventional pain management: a friend or a foe--or simply foes?

The present evidence illustrates that the placebo effect depends on a variety of neurochemical and neurophysiological mechanisms, which are measurable and modifiable. However, the placebo response is inexorably tied to the treatment context. All medical treatments take place in a particular context; this context includes the therapist's attitudes, psychosocial factors affecting the therapeutic ...