The Placebo Response and the Power of Unconscious Healing

296 Pages·2008·6.44 MB·English

by  Richard Kradin

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R K
ichaRd Radin
New York London
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Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
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I dedicate this book to my wife, Karen,
and to my children
Rachel, Sarah, Ben, Mike,
and to Daniel and Michael,
for being patient with me while
I was preoccupied with this project. Although
they have never quite understood what exactly it
is that I do as a profession, they can rest assured
that they are not alone in their confusion.
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Contents
Acknowledgments / ix
Introduction / xi
1 The Placebo Response / 1
2 The Basis of the Placebo Response in 
Sickness and Healing / 11
3 A Brief History of Medicine and the 
Changing Implications of Placebos / 29
4 Placebo Effects—Who Gets Them? / 83
5 What Do We Know about How Placebos Act? / 101
6 The Anomalous Placebo Response / 169
7 Placebo and the Truth / 199
8 The Challenge of Harnessing the Placebo Response / 211
Bibliography / 249
Index / 265
vii
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Acknowledgments
This text has been several years in the making. The inspiration 
for it arose out of my musings concerning how the mind and 
body interact in health and disease. The idea of developing an 
explanatory model for the placebo response was motivated by a 
National Institutes of Health grant application that I prepared 
several years ago. Aspects of this model have previously been pre-
sented in journal publications (Kradin, 2004a, 2004b), but they 
have matured into what is presented here. I am grateful to my 
colleagues for encouraging me to write this text, in particular 
to Robert Bosnak, who has devoted his career to mind–body 
interactions. I thank my editors at Routledge for recognizing the 
importance of this topic. My thanks to Michelle Forrestall Lee 
for her expert assistance with the artwork and to Linda Arini for 
helping to compile the manuscript. Finally, Joe, the incorrigible 
dachshund, and Simon, the doe-eyed Rhodesian ridgeback, were 
my constant companions during this project.
ix
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