Introduction: Placebo and nocebo phenomena in pharmacology are very important, but controversial issues from the perspective of evidence-based medicine (EBM) in many ways. Topic: Glorifi cation and vilifi cation of placebo controlled studies are the two opposite sides of the prevailing misunderstanding placebo and nocebo phenomena in medicine and pharmacology. This misunderstanding is an essent...

The nocebo effect consists in delivering verbal suggestions of negative outcomes so that the subject expects clinical worsening. Here we show that nocebo suggestions, in which expectation of pain increase is induced, are capable of producing both hyperalgesic and allodynic responses. By extending previous findings on the placebo effect, we investigated the role of learning in the nocebo effect ...

OBJECTIVES Medication side effects are common, often leading to reduced quality of life, nonadherence, and financial costs for health services. Many side effects are the result of a psychologically mediated "nocebo effect." This review identifies the risk factors involved in the development of nocebo effects. METHOD Web of Science, Scopus, MEDLINE, PsycINFO, Journals@Ovid full text, and Globa...

While the placebo effect has been studied for a long time, much less is known about its negative counterpart, named the nocebo effect. However, it may be of particular importance because of its impact on the treatment outcomes and public health. We conducted a review on the nocebo effect using PubMed and other databases up to July 2014. The nocebo effect refers by definition to the induction or...

Placebo and nocebo effects are essential components of medical practice and efficacy research, and can be regarded as a special case of context learning. A fundamental function of the central nervous system is to configure the way in which previous learned context becomes linked to corresponding responses. These responses could be either automatic procedures with little flexibility or highly ad...

BACKGROUND Nocebo phenomena are common in clinical practice and have recently become a popular topic of research and discussion among basic scientists, clinicians, and ethicists. METHODS We selectively searched the PubMed database for articles published up to December 2011 that contained the key words "nocebo" or "nocebo effect." RESULTS By definition, a nocebo effect is the induction of a ...

The purpose of the present study was to examine placebo and nocebo effects under hypnotic analgesia in lowly hypnotizable (LH) highly (HH) subjects. A nocebo, obtained a two-step intervention (verbal expectation conditioning), were studied 12 LH HH subjects hypnosis. Visual analog scales (VASs) pain intensity recorded response short, painful electrical stimuli. VAS scores placebo-produced diffe...

Nocebo effects, i.e., adverse treatment effects which are induced by patients' expectations, are known to contribute to the experience of physical symptoms such as pain and itch. A better understanding of how to minimize nocebo responses might eventually contribute to enhanced treatment effects. However, little is known about how to reduce nocebo effects. In the current randomized controlled st...

The nocebo effect is a phenomenon that is opposite to the placebo effect, whereby expectation of a negative outcome may lead to the worsening of a symptom. Thus far, its study has been limited by ethical constraints, particularly in patients, as a nocebo procedure is per se stressful and anxiogenic. It basically consists in delivering verbal suggestions of negative outcomes so that the subject ...