The Ethics of Placebo Effects in Clinical Practice and Research

Publication date: Available online 7 August 2018Source: International Review of NeurobiologyAuthor(s): Marco AnnoniAbstractThis chapter provides a synthetic overview of the contemporary debate over the ethics of placebos and placebo effects in both clinical and research contexts. Section 1 briefly reconstructs how ethical attitudes toward the use of placebos have changed during the last century following the emergence of autonomy in medical ethics. Next, Sections 2–4 chart the main ethical issues concerning the use of placebos in clinical settings, examining: the ethics of deceptive placebos; the ethics of placebos without deception; and the ethics of modulating placebo and nocebo effects without placebos. Finally, Section 5 outlines the role of placebos in research, discussing the ethics of placebos as controls in clinical experiments.
Source: International Review of Neurobiology - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research