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Importance of Placebo Effect in Pain Management

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Essentials of Pain Management

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Abstract

The word placebo is derived from the Latin verb “to please” and, as early as 1811, appeared in the Hooper’s Medical Dictionary as a medical treatment aimed at pleasing – a placebo was defined as “an epithet given to any medication adopted more to please than to benefit the patient (Hooper 1817).” In the modern day era, Tilburt et al. refer to the placebo effect as “positive clinical outcomes caused by a treatment that is not attributable to its known physical properties or mechanism of action (Tilburt et al. 2008).”

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Pain Medicine, Department of Anesthesiology and Critical Care Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Baltimore, MD, USA

    Charles Brown MD & Paul J. Christo MD (Division of Pain Medicine)

Authors
  1. Charles Brown MD
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  2. Paul J. Christo MD
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. School of Medicine, Dept. Anesthesiology, Yale University, Cedar Street 333, New Haven, 06520-8051, Connecticut, USA

    Nalini Vadivelu

  2. Brigham & Women's Hospital, Dept. Anesthesia, Harvard Medical School, Francis St. 75, Boston, 02115, Massachusetts, USA

    Richard D. Urman

  3. School of Medicine, Dept. Anesthesiology, Yale University, Cedar Street 333, New Haven, 06520-8051, Connecticut, USA

    Roberta L. Hines

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Brown, C., Christo, P.J. (2011). Importance of Placebo Effect in Pain Management. In: Vadivelu, N., Urman, R., Hines, R. (eds) Essentials of Pain Management. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-87579-8_11

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-387-87579-8_11

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  • Print ISBN: 978-0-387-87578-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-0-387-87579-8

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