Thursday, January 03, 2008

Just Take It

This story highlights an interesting study that's just been published, showing that nearly half of doctors have at some time given patients a placebo as treatment. And often it helped.

Seems to me this ought to happen a bit more often. My sense is doctors often write a prescription just to shut up a patient who is complaining, even though they don't need medication. Perhaps more of this will reduce the amount of unnecessary use of antibiotics for conditions that don't respond to them.

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