The Placebo Effect in Dermatology: Managing Patients’ Expectations

A placebo, which literally means “I shall please,” pleases not just the patients, but doctors as well. Although initially coined as a somewhat derogatory term for hired funeral mourners in the fourteenth century, its use in medical literature is first documented in the late eighteenth century [1]. One of the first documented implementations of the use of placebo as a control was by John Haygarth in 1801, when he found out that wooden imitators of metallic rods (which were presumed to improve various diseases by electromagnetism) were similarly effective to relieve diseases [1]. Henry Beecher was one of the firsts to attempt to quantify the placebo effect in 1955 when he claimed that in 15 different trials of different diseases, 35% out of 1082 patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo alone. However, further re-analysis did not find this to be true, although this 35% figure has become entrenched in the literature [2].