The Placebo Concept in Medicine and Psychiatry (from Graham Stephens Philosophical Psychopathology Chap13)英文电子书.pdf

The Placebo Concept in Medicine and Psychiatry Adolf Gninbaum 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 a rigorous articulation of the placebo notion , a lucid new terminology that obviates the defects intrinsic to the traditional locutions in the literature and a substantial employed placebo , revamping of A K. Shapiro s influential prior definition of placebo . 1 Introduction Just what is the problem of identifying an intervention or treatment t of one sort or another as a placebo for a target disorderD ? One set of circumstances others in which the need for such an , among , identification arise is the : Mter the administration of may following t to some victims of D some of them recover from their affliction to , a significant extent . Now suppose that there is cogent evidence that this improvement can indeed be causally attributed at all to some factors or other among the spectrum of constituents comprising the dispensation of t to a patient . Then it can become important to know whether the therapeutic gain that ensued from t in the alleviation of D was due to those in its that the advo- parti