November 2023
In his book “The Power of Placebos”, Jeremy Howick provides an interdisciplinary perspective on placebos based on more than 20 years of research and data from over 300,000 patients.
Howick, who is director of the Stoneygate Centre for Excellence in Empathic Healthcare at the University of Leicester, explains why physicians should consider using placebos regularly in their practices.
The “placebo effect” is sometimes dismissed as a nuisance in research, but it shows that we have self-healing capacity. Negative placebo, when adverse physiological symptoms are developed in the body through belief, is called nocebo.
“For various reasons, the nocebo effect is more powerful than the placebo effect”, said Howick in a commentary.
