Anyone who has watched any sport in the last few years will be aware of Kinesio Tape (KT). It’s the coloured tape that athletes wear to recover from/prevent injury. I really noticed it in the 2012 Olympics, when it seemed that every second athlete had some on, and it is still extremely prevalent. Continue reading
placebo
Alternative medicine as a placebo
I recently wrote a post about the decision by NICE to no longer recommend acupuncture for lower back pain. This decision was made because, like most alternative medicine, acupuncture hasn’t been shown to work any better than a placebo. However, plenty of people use and get benefit from such treatments. This raises an interesting question: is there a place for complementary and alternative medicine (as a placebo) in the clinic? Continue reading
The placebo effect
The recent decision by NICE to no longer recommend acupuncture for lower back pain got me thinking about the placebo effect. It is a bizarre phenomenon: any treatment (regardless of whether it is a real treatment or not) will improve symptoms in some people simply because the recipient believes that it will work. So if we give someone a placebo (a sugar pill for example) and tell them that it can work for their illness, a proportion of patients will feel better. There are so many interesting things about the placebo effect it’s difficult to know where to start.
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