Quotes About Placebo

#1. If placebo effects were this good, they should just make placebos the way to treat depression - maybe that's what they did; maybe Zoloft was cornstarch.

Ned Vizzini

#2. Doctor, I'd like a bottle of placebo please.

Candess M. Campbell

#3. Like ugly Asian babies, valid superstitions don't exist. At best, any perceived effect of a superstition is you merely psyching yourself out. Think of it as an asshole placebo.

Orlando Winters

#4. Placebo is music for outsiders, by outsiders and our gigs are like conventions of outcasts, which is cool.

Brian Molko

#5. With a drug trial, everyone gets the exact same pill or the exact same placebo. With therapy, you can't separate the tools from the person using the tools. There's no good experimental technique for measuring a therapist's kindness, wisdom or judgment.

Anonymous

#6. God is a placebo for your own mortality.

Robert Barron

#7. A placebo-controlled, double-blind, randomised trial of boys with autism found that two to three servings of cruciferous vegetables a day improves social interaction, abnormal behaviour and verbal communication - within a matter of weeks.

Michael Greger

#8. If Placebo was a drug, they would no doubt be pure heroin - dangerous, mysterious and totally addictive.

Brian Molko

#9. Prayer ... panacea for some, placebo to others. I thought of it as an epidural administered through the soul to anesthetize the mind.

Clyde DeSouza

#10. There is a major problem with reliance on placebos, like most vitamins and antioxidants. Everyone gets upset about Big Science, Big Pharma, but they love Big Placebo.

Michael Specter

#11. Stef is officially the sexiest member of Placebo

Brian Molko

#12. The big bulk of the response to antidepressants is the placebo response.

Irving Kirsch

#13. My psychiatrist diagnosed me a Hypochondriac. I said, "Okay, can you prescribe me a placebo?"

"Not for Type-2 Hypochondriacs," he said. Your types would just fake faking. Then we'd have a real problem.

Brian Spellman

#14. I've spent a lot of time trying to understand how all the big cosmetics companies get away with the placebo science and unscientific claims.

Chris Toumazou

#15. The placebo effect is one of the most fascinating things in the whole of medicine. It's not just about taking a pill, and your performance and your pain getting better. It's about our beliefs and expectations. It's about the cultural meaning of a treatment.

Ben Goldacre

#16. For me, as a beginning novelist, all other living writers form a control group for whom the world is a placebo.

Nicholson Baker

#17. You have to believe in a placebo or it won't work, but if it works, it's obviously working in some indirect way, through feedback in the immune system, let us say, or in the willpower of the patient to take a more strenuous exercise in their own therapy.

Charles Jencks

#18. A man doesn't need a study to know if he's feeling amorous. There is no such thing as a placebo erection.

Chris Kilham

#19. Research shows that if patients believe they are taking the real drug, they are more confident of improving and, so, improve even if they are actually on the placebo. Conversely, if they suspect they are taking the placebo, their expectancy of improvement declines, and so does their improvement.

John Cornwell

#20. Give someone who has faith in you a placebo and call it a hair growing pill, anti-nausea pill or whatever, and you will be amazed at how many respond to your therapy.

Bernie Siegel

#21. The doctor-patient relationship is critical to the placebo effect.

Irving Kirsch

#22. I do a lot of research on the placebo effect, not just in depression but in irritable bowel syndrome, pain, arthritis of the knee, migraine, asthma.

Irving Kirsch

#23. You are a placebo responder. Your body plays tricks on your mind. You cannot be trusted.

Ben Goldacre

#24. I was a traditional teacher for a time, but my students would ride the energy. I wanted to free people not give them a placebo.

Frederick Lenz

#25. I have a prescription here for Obecalp for [patient's name], but I can't find it listed anywhere." He said, "Oh. That's placebo spelled backwards.

Dennis Miller

#26. Religion is now viewed by many as a placebo or emotional crutch precisely because that is how we often pitch the gospel to unbelievers

J.P. Moreland

#27. I often felt better as soon as I swallowed my vitamin C, long before it had time to take effect. Medical researchers call it 'placebo effect'; I prefer to call it magic, for it occurs when something - a pill or a word - is imbued with power and meaning, and so it becomes effective. That is alchemy.

Kat Duff

#28. When people think about a placebo such as the royal touch, they usually dismiss it as "just psychology." But, there is nothing "just" about the power of a placebo, and in reality it represents the amazing way our mind controls our body.

Dan Ariely

#29. Prayer may be a placebo for the disease of helplessness, but placebos can make you feel better.

David Mitchell

#30. To be less dumb, remember your propensity for post hoc postulation and the power positive permutations of the placebo effect have to pollute your perspicacity.

David McRaney

#31. In all technai or arts (medicine perhaps most of all), there is a self-exhilaration on the part of the practitioner (the intoxication of the ego with its own potency) which is infectious: the patient enjoys a placebo-effect which redounds to the ego of the "artist."

Kenny Smith

#32. Surgery is a powerful placebo, perhaps the ultimate placebo. The effectiveness of a placebo is directly proportional to the impression it makes on the patient's subconscious mind.

John E. Sarno

#33. There is an almost linear relationship between the methodological quality of a homeopathy trial and the result it gives. The worse the study - which is to say, the less it is a "fair test" - the more likely it is to find that homeopathy is better than placebo.

Ben Goldacre

#34. A placebo is a phony cure that works. This is very hard for the medical profession to get their teeth around because they hate placebos, but scientifically, placebos work in about 30% of cases that are psychogenic diseases.

Charles Jencks

#35. But this anti-war protest, is far from a success; it is just a placebo for the people. These peacemakers feel so satisfied, gratified; gay-gallant-and-gleeful. But they do not achieve anything acceptable, perceptible; or peaceful.

Joss Sheldon

#36. Problems in medicine do not mean that homeopathic sugar pills work; just because there are problems with aircraft design, that doesn't mean that magic carpets really fly.

Ben Goldacre

#37. Music has touched me deeply, sometimes to tears. But at the same time it's been life-affirming, because I've been grateful for the fact that I'm alive and human and capable of being so moved.

Brian Molko

#38. I felt Mr Willard had deserted me. I thought he must have planned it all along, but Buddy said No, his father simply couldn't stand the sight of sickness and especially his own son's sickness, because he thought all sickness was sickness of the will. Mr Willard had never been sick a day in his life.

Sylvia Plath

#39. Believe in what makes you Healthy, because everything else is just garbage.

Gary Hopkins

#40. I never thought I'd say this, but I miss voter fraud.

Jon Stewart

#41. Because a heart that hurts, is a heart that works.

Placebo

#42. Just as the desperate, terminally ill cancer patient often turns to expensive placebos for an imaginary chance at more life, the desperate, terminally alive sad people turn to expensive placebos for a chance to imagine a decent life.

Sarah Perry