There have been a lot of studies done on the “placebo” effect, but not much is known about “nocebo”- which refers to a detrimental effect on health produced by psychological or psychosomatic factors such as negative expectations of treatment or prognosis. A recent interesting study published in Science magazine showed that people who were administered with costlier medicines experienced more side effects than those who were administered with cheaper medicines with the similar generic component. The survey was done to test the effect of two skin creams (anti-itch) in about 50 volunteers.
These findings reconfirm the fact that expectations have a lot of influence on the perception of a drug’s side effects. Have you ever experienced such effect in your patients?
