So a guy or gal walks into the doctor complaining of an out of kilter lumbago. The Doctor suspects that since this is the 17th visit this year, and a lumbago doesn’t kilter, it inflates, he needs to give the hypocondriac something to settle his nerves.
Is there a medical placebo he can write an prescription for? Does it happen? Or is the potential for a lawsuit too great?
I’ve wondered this myself and have nothing to offer other than the name of the antibiotic which should be prescribed for anyone with a cold, Placebomycin.
I’ve never known or heard of a doctor doing this.(and I’ve worked with some boobs over the years)
The risk would be too great, I think. Here in Ontario, Can. we have an entity known as the College of Physicians and Surgeons and in spite of the medical professions habit of closing ranks, this is not an organization you want scrutinizing your practice.
The only thing I can think of that might come close is prescribing something that while not specifically intended to alleviate your specific ailment, may be of some value, in a backdoor sort of way.
Some anti-depressants are prescribed in small dosages in the management of chronic pain. There are other medications that have side effects that may be beneficial for certain conditions, although their main thrust is for something else completely.
Placebomycn, 
, I love it!!!
Well, I’ve suggested trying treatments where I wasn’t sure if the benefit came from the actual treatment vs. placebo effect. And I’ve told the patient that.
But I’ve never prescribed a placebo pill, and I don’t know of any of my colleagues who have. And I doubt that these days a pharmacy would fill it.
Doing so would be unethical, unless you inform the patient of what you’re doing, and get their assent.
Hey, this question looks familiar!
I’m pretty sure that I remember Lewis Thomas saying, in his autobiography, that most of the “drugs” his doctor father dispensed were placebos. In those days, before antibiotics and other miracle drugs, an accurate diagnosis and a placebo were about all a doctor could provide to a patient.
And it was asked at least once more, since I distinctly remember answering it that indeed my boss gave his patients placebos on a rather frequent basis. But they were dispensed at the clinic, not filled by a pharmacy.
I think that it might have been implied before but I feel I must state it directly. There are a group of patients enrolled in most clinical trials that gets nothing but placebo.
Yes, but when they sign up for the study, they are told that they may well end up in a group getting a placebo.
I believe it is a serious ethical violation to give a patient a placebo without their knowledge. I’m not talking about giving them a medication which may or may not be effective for their condition: Most medications fall into that category, and there’s lively debate over whether some medications do anything than act as a placebo. But they’re generally not being prescribed as a placebo.
For me to give a patient something I firmly believe is nothing more than placebo, while not sharing that information with them, is improper. IMHO.
QtM Thanks for the feedback. I suspect it was the case. I wondered about it while reading the recient Straight Dope article on Vitamin C.
If everyone believes in the placebo effect, you should be able to openly market sugar pills as a cure for everything…and have it work.
Well, look at the herbal suppliment diet industry.
I’m a Pharmacy Technician at Walgreen’s, and I’m here to tell the OP that there’s no such thing as a “prescription placebo”. Part of my job entails typing the actual prescriptions from the crumpled hard copy handed in at the window into the computer so that the computer can print out what kind of pills and how many of them on the self-adhesive label that goes on the pill bottle (“Plavix 50 mg/ dispense 60 / take 2 tablets by mouth twice a day / Refills 5” etc.) and there is no such drug in my Drug Inquiry database for “placebo” or “sugar pill”, no category in my prescription-typing duties for “give this guy some fake medicine”.
Now, what doctors can sometimes do for the hypochondriac patient is give him a scrip for vitamins of some sort; folic acid and ferrous sulfate are popular. But as to what the doctor tells the patient his medicine is supposed to do, I have no idea. If the patient asks us, we tell them: “it’s vitamins”.
And I would add that, off the top of my head, fully one-third of the people I see every day have absolutely NO idea what their pills are for. The doctor gives them a prescription, they trot down to Walgreen’s and get it filled, and they’re happy, Doctor took care of them. They come in and want a refill, you ask them for what drug on the list of their meds you’re looking at on the computer, all they know is, “It’s my blood pressure pill.” So I would guess that a sizeable percentage of the prescriptions we fill for folic acid are probably for folks who are happy just to have a pill to take. I’m at a loss to explain its popularity in the Decatur scrip-writing community otherwise. We don’t fill near as many prescriptions for the rest of the vitamins as we do for folic acid.
I was about to post a reply, then I recalled that I had already written one about this. On searching, I found this thread.
My dad was a doctor before he retired. He didn’t write many prescriptions in his specialty. However he said it was pretty common for doctors to prescibe “Old lady pills”. Essentially very cheep medications that didn’t really do very much in he first place, were totally non-interactive, but had impressive names. They mostly gave them to hypochondriac old women and new mothers who simply wouldn’t accept that nothing was wrong, and felt better to be given something.
As I said he didn’t write the scripts, but there was enough of a code that when he was asked by someone who knew he was a doctor what drug ‘x’ or ‘y’ did. He would hem and haw and bullshit(since he didn’t know what condition was being placeboed) and not expose it(not that any doctor should take questioning another doctors treatment lightly in he first place while in the checkout line). I asked him recently and he said any doctor would be a fool to do it these days, as much to do with the internet saying what it actually does as a fear of liability. But back in the day unless someone actually went to find a Merck they never had any idea.