Renewable Revolution

Shadow Medicine: The Placebo in Conventional and Alternative Therapies
By John S. Haller Jr.
Columbia University Press, July 2014

In Shadow Medicine, medical historian John S. Haller Jr. calls for a truce between evidence-based medicine (EBM) and complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).

Haller writes. “The placebo highlights the nonspecific (i.e., nonbiological) aspect of medicine, a condition that creates a distracting ambiguity for the medical scientist who finds it difficult to build a bridge between the material and the psychosomatic and behavioral side of healing. To ignore or otherwise discount this phenomenon is to deny the multifactorial nature of disease causation.”


Devising new experimental protocols that can better tease out a scientific footing for the placebo could be the key to bridging the gap between EBM and CAM, Haller urges.

http://www.the-scientist.com//?articles.view/articleNo/40601/title/Capsule-Reviews/