Healthy Skepticism Library item: 13151

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: Journal Article

Waber RL, Shiv B, Carmon Z, Ariely D.
Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy
JAMA 2008 Mar 5; 299:(9):1016-1017
http://jama.ama-assn.org/cgi/content/extract/299/9/1016

Abstract:

To the Editor: It is possible that the therapeutic efficacy of medications is affected by commercial features such as lower prices. Because such features influence patients’ expectations,1 they may play an unrecognized therapeutic role by influencing the efficacy of medical therapies, especially in conditions associated with strong placebo responses.2-3 To investigate this possibility, we studied the effect of price on analgesic response to placebo pills…
… Placebo responses to commercial features have many potential clinical implications. For example, they may help explain the popularity of high-cost medical therapies (eg, cyclooxygenase 2 inhibitors) over inexpensive, widely available alternatives (eg, over-the-counter nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs) and why patients switching from branded medications may report that their generic equivalents are less effective. Studies of real-world effectiveness may be more generalizable if they reflect how medications are sold in addition to how they are formulated. Furthermore, clinicians may be able to harness quality cues in beneficial ways,6 for example, by de-emphasizing potentially deleterious commercial factors (eg, low-priced, generic)…

ariely@mit.edu