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The placebo concept in medicine and psychiatry1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 July 2009

Adolf Grünbaum
Adolf Grünbaum*
Affiliation:
Departments of Philosophy and Psychiatry, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
*
2Address for correspondence: Professor A. Grünbaum, 2509 Cathedral of Learning, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, 15260, USA.
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Synopsis

The standard technical vocabulary used to define placebo therapies and experimental placebo controls in medicine and psychiatry is both confusing and obscure. To achieve conceptual clarity in the theory of placebogenic phenomena, this paper offers (1) a rigorous articulation of the placebo notion, (2) a lucid new terminology that obviates the defects intrinsic to the traditional locutions employed in the placebo literature, and (3) a substantial revamping of A. K. Shapiro's influential prior definition of‘placebo’. This paper supersedes an earlier version (Grünbaum, 1981).

Type
Research Article
Information
Psychological Medicine , Volume 16 , Issue 1 , February 1986 , pp. 19 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1986

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Footnotes

1

This paper is a revised and enlarged version of the author's chapter in Placebo: Theory, Research and Mechanisms (ed. L. White B. Tursky and G. E. Schwartz), pp. 9–36. Guilford Press: New York (1985).

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