"Can the recommendation for a treatment intended to promote the placebo effect be made without deception and also without undermining its therapeutic potential? Consider, for example, the case of a clinician who recommends treatment with acupuncture for a patient with chronic low back pain who has not been helped by standard medical therapy. Aware of the results of the recent acupuncture trials, described above, this clinician thinks that acupuncture may work by promoting a placebo response. The clinician might provide the following disclosure to the patient: “I recommend that you try acupuncture. Several large studies have shown that traditional acupuncture is not better than a fake acupuncture treatment, but that both of these produce considerably greater symptom improvement in patients with chronic low back pain condition as compared with those patients who receive no treatment or conventional medical therapy. Although the specific type of needling doesn't appear to make any difference, it is likely that acupuncture works by a psychological mechanism that promotes self-healing, known as the placebo effect.” On its face, this disclosure appears honest. A patient who received this disclosure and subsequently got better after undergoing acupuncture might nonetheless develop a false belief about why it worked. This does not mean, however, that the patient has been deceived by his physician."
from:
Placebo Effects: Biological, Clinical and Ethical Advances (Damien G Finniss, Ted J Kaptchuk, Franklin Miller, and Fabrizio Benedetti
PMCID: PMC2832199 / NIHMSID: NIHMS169379