This Is Your Brain On Placebos!

The prescribing of placebos has a long and controversial history in the practice of medicine. A recent study by Dr. Ezekiel J Emanuel in the BMJ (2008;337:a1938) showed that approximately half of physicians admit to prescribing placebos.
New research has identified genetic markers in people susceptible to the placebo effect and this opens a whole new “can of worms”. Could placebo controlled studies be manipulated by selecting patients based on their response to placebos?
Check out this interesting report from Science‘s Rachel Zelkowitz about the latest efforts to understand the placebo effect…
Image: Patients with a certain copy of a serotonin gene showed less amygdala activity (left), indicating reduced anxiety, after treatment with placebos. Credit: T. Furmark et al., Journal of Neuroscience