Placebo Effects

Fabrizio Benedetti received the Medical Doctor (MD) degree in 1981 from the University of Turin Medical School. In 1984, he received a Silbert International Award from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA). In the 1980s and 1990s, he worked in the Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at UCLA and was a visiting professor in the Department of Pharmacology at the University of Texas in Dallas. He has been Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Turin Medical School since 1999. He has been a member of the six-strong group on placebo of the Mind-Brain-Behavior Initiative at Harvard University, and a consultant for the Placebo Project at the US National Institute of Health. His current scientific interests are the placebo effect across diseases, pain in dementia, and intraoperative neurophysiology for mapping the human brain.

• The patient's brain: setting the stage for understanding placebo effects 1: A brief evolutionary account of medical care 2: Emergence and development of scientific medicine 3: Feeling sick: A combination of bottom-up and top-down events 4: Seeking relief: The activation of motivational and reward circuits 5: Meeting the therapist: A look into trust, hope, empathy and compassion mechanisms 6: The brain of the demented patient Placebo effects: General concepts and mechanisms 7: The traditional concept of placebo 8: A modern view of placebo and placebo-related effects 9: Placing placebo effects within the context of the doctor-patient relationship as a defence mechanism Disease-based classification of placebo effects - Most studied conditions 10: Pain 11: Diseases of the nervous system 12: Mental and behavioural disorders 13: Immune and endocrine systems Disease-based classification of placebo effects - Less studied conditions 14: Cardiovascular and respiratory system 15: Gastrointestinal and genitourinary disorders 16: Special medical conditions and therapeutic interventions Clinical, ethical and methodological considerations 17: Clinical-ethical implications and applications 18: How to run a placebo study: A closer look into complex experimental designs Beyond the healing context 19: Beyond the healing context 20: Everyday life

Review from previous edition Benedetti is highly analytical in his approach and, at the same time, has the ability to explain complex matters so that they are easily understood. This book should be a must for all who struggle to make sense out of the intriguing phenomenon we call placebo.