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Alternative medicine and placebo effects -- for pets?

10/9/2014

 
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By Brennen McKenzie

Many alternative therapies are known to act mostly or entirely as placebos. Acupuncture, homeopathy, and many popular nutraceuticals like glucosamine consistently fail to demonstrate benefits greater than placebos in controlled clinical studies. Yet because of their placebo effects, they often make people taking them feel that their symptoms are improved. 

Much debate has occurred around the question of whether such non-specific actions are truly beneficial and whether it is appropriate to encourage or discourage patients from using therapies with primarily placebo effects. In the case of human beings, the perception of relief may be of some value even in the absence of true improvement in one’s physical health. Physicians differ in their opinions about whether the use of placebos, and the deception of the patient this activity entails
, is ethical in clinical practice. However, the terms and details of this debate are quite different when the doctors are veterinarians, like myself, and the patients are non-human animals.


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    SWIFT is named after Jonathan Swift, the author of Gulliver's Travels. In the book, Gulliver encounters among other things a floating island inhabited by spaced-out scientists and philosophers who hardly deal with reality. Swift was among the first to launch well-designed critiques against the flummery - political, philosophical, and scientific - of his time, a tradition that we hope to maintain at The James Randi Foundation.

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