Great Expectations: Clinicians' Beliefs About Efficacy Might Drive Placebo Responses

Because patients' expectations of treatment success play an important role in recovery from illness, controlled clinical trials are important to prove that a medication or psychological treatment is effective independent of the placebo experience. But how a clinician's cognitive expectations and behaviors affect the clinical interaction is often overlooked. In a clever experiment using laypeople, researchers first conditioned subjects assigned to be “doctors” to believe that an inert cream had analgesic properties by pairing it with lower pain-stimulation intensities. Then, in a single-blind, parallel-group experiment (24 doctor-patient pairs), “doctors” administered the supposedly analgesic cream and a control cream to “patients” given the…