Medical blog

The Associated Press reports that a study published last week in BMJ (British Medical Journal) indicates that in contradiction to American Medical Association guidelines, about half of doctors in the United States “say they
,” generally without the patients’ knowledge or consent.
Franklin G. Miller, one of the study’s authors and director of the National Institutes of Health’s research ethic program called the results, “disturbing.”
Doctors, the authors said, “probably reasoned that doing something was better than doing nothing,” AP said.
A January 2008 study from the Journal of General Internal Medicine provides more evidence for this trend; of nearly 500 faculty doctors surveyed at medical schools in Chicago, more than 200 said they had
.
According to a Time magazine article about the study, “Among the reasons the doctors gave: to calm a patient down, to respond to demands for medication that the doctor felt was unnecessary, or simply to do something after all other clinical treatment options had failed.”
Nearly all the doctors surveyed said prescribing placebos was acceptable, even if that doctor hadn’t actually done so.
According to Time, the AMA “tells its members that ‘[p]hysicians may use placebos for diagnosis or treatment only if the patient is informed of and agrees to its use.’”