Placebos in Clinical Practice: Comparing Attitudes, Beliefs, and Patterns of Use Between Academic Psychiatrists and Nonpsychiatrists

Amir Raz; Natasha Campbell; Daniella Guindi; Christina Holcroft; Catherine Déry; Olivia Cukier.
Controversial and ethically tenuous, the use of placebos is central to medicine but even more pivotal to psychosocial therapies. Scholars, researchers, and practitioners largely disagree about the conceptualization of placebos. While different professionals often confound the meanings of placebo effects with placebo responses, physicians continue to prescribe placebos as part of clinical practice. Our study aims to review attitudes and beliefs concerning placebos outside of clinical research. Herein we compare patterns of placebo use reported by academic psychiatrists with those reported by physicians from different specialties across Canadian medical schools. Using a web-based tool, we circulated an online survey to all 17 Canadian medical schools, with a special emphasis on psychiatry departments therein and in university-affiliated teaching hospitals./.../