Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13066
Warning: This library includes all items relevant to health product marketing that we are aware of regardless of quality. Often we do not agree with all or part of the contents.
Publication type: news
Fay Cortez M.
Drug Prices Fool Patients About Benefits, Placebo Study Shows
Bloomberg.com 2008 Mar 5
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601202&sid=aAmdWrOf6gl0&refer=healthcare
Full text:
A medication’s price impacts how much “benefit” patients get from it, even when the pill is an inactive placebo, according to a study by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Investigators gave 82 volunteers electric shocks on the wrist to test their tolerance, and later repeated the procedure after giving them a pill to ease the pain. Half were told the medicine was a new, fast-acting opioid like codeine that cost $2.50 a pill, while the others were told the drug was discounted to 10 cents. They all actually got an identical placebo.
More than 85 percent of volunteers who thought they got the $2.50 pill reported a drop in pain, compared with 61 percent of those getting the cheaper one, according to the report in a letter published in today’s Journal of the American Medical Association. The findings may help explain why consumers prefer high-priced drugs like Pfizer Inc.‘s Celebrex when cheaper alternatives are available, and why patients complain that generic medications aren’t as effective, the researchers said.
“The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating, least harnessed forces in the universe,” said Dan Ariely, now a behavioral economist at Duke University. “Physicians want to think it’s the medicine and not their enthusiasm about a particular drug that makes a drug more therapeutically effective,” he said in a statement.
The findings need to be confirmed in a larger study, the researchers said.
