Pain, Placebos, and the Benefits of Disclosure

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Notes

1 According to Gligorov, the clinician is not being dishonest nor deceptive. “Based on the evidence for the cognitive penetration of pain, a clinician prescribing placebo analgesia would have a justified expectation of the effectiveness of the treatment. And informing the patient that the clinician expects that taking this pill will treat the pain would not be misleading” (XX).

2 Thus, deceptive use of placebo analgesia can negatively impact a patient’s expectations for pain relief from proven analgesics in the future, thereby, according to Gligorov’s own arguments, harming the patient in the long run.

3 Gligorov adds, “In this situation and situations sufficiently like this one, the best course of action is to minimize the expectation for intense pain. This does not mean failing to warn a patient that the procedure might hurt, but it means that a clinician ought to choose words that do not prime the patient to experience pain” (XX, emphases added).