Hello fellow Pain Geeks!

Welcome to our theme of Pain and Placebo.

Placebo is a well researched phenomenon that therapists and healthcare professionals are beginning to acknowledge and understand more and more.

What we hear a lot is clinicans appealing to the 'placebo effect' and the 'nocebo effect' when they don't understand why a person improved or why their experience of pain worsened. But do we actually know what we are talking about when we use this term?

We've picked some readings for us to explore together, challenge our assumptions and support the discussion about placebo in clinical practice. 

August 2022:

Humanities: You will no pain: Derren Brown: The Experiments

Reading 1: Rossettini, G., Camerone, E.M., Carlino, E., Benedetti, F. and Testa, M., 2020. Context matters: the psychoneurobiological determinants of placebo, nocebo and context-related effects in physiotherapy. Archives of physiotherapy, 10(1), pp.1-12.

Reading 2: Benedetti, F., Lanotte, M., Lopiano, L. and Colloca, L., 2007. When words are painful: unraveling the mechanisms of the nocebo effect. Neuroscience, 147(2), pp.260-271.

Click on the links below for August 2022 to access our blogs.

All the readings

Resources

Extra readings, videos, podcasts and blogs to help you navigate this theme.