Whenever a pharmaceutical company tests a new migraine prevention drug, nearly 1 in 20 subjects will drop out because they can't stand the drug's side effects. They'd rather deal with the headaches than keep receiving treatment. But those suffering patients might be surprised to learn that the drug they've quit is only a sugar pill: the 5 percent dropout rate is from the placebo side.
Lurking in the shadows around any discussion of the placebo effect is its nefarious and lesser-known twin, the nocebo effect. Placebo is Latin for "I will please"; nocebo means "I will do harm." Just as the expectation of feeling better can make our symptoms ease, the expectation of feeling worse can make it a reality.
In a review paper published last week in the German journal Deutsches Ärzteblatt International, researchers say doctors and drug companies are unwittingly introducing patients to the demon of nocebo. Led ...
