Questionnaire survey on use of placebo

To the editor,

We wish to thank Professor Asbjorn Hrobjartsson for his enlightening
comments. Of course, thankfulness was not the only emotion which his
letter aroused. We also felt a
good deal of embarrassment. He is of course correct that more people have
examined the issue of placebo prescriptions in clinical use than we had
realized. Professor Hrobjartsson’s research is particularly germane,
insofar as it includes a nationwide survey recently conducted on the use
of the placebo.

After our own medline searches did not produce any articles on the
topic, we sought help from the medical school library, which was kind
enough to assist us. The efforts produced only the Goodwin paper.

We are pleased that the findings of other research efforts support
our conclusion that the use of the placebo in clinical practice is
widespread and deserving of greater attention amongst clinicians and
ethicists.

We believe that our methodology, which involved obtaining information
from one senior doctor and one senior nurse in every medical and surgical
department at two large hospitals, advances our knowledge of what
transpires in clinical practice.

We regret that we were not aware of previous reports at the time of
preparation of the manuscript, and hope that Prof. Hrobjartsson and the
other researchers to whom he refers will accept our sincere apologies.

Pesach Lichtenberg

Competing interests:
None declared