August 12, 2015
ICS graduate student Scott Schafer and mentor Professor Tor Wager’s paper entitled: Conditioned Placebo Analgesia Persists When Subjects Know They are Receiving a Placebo was published in the May Issue of the Journal of Pain. Their work demonstrates a placebo effect still held, even when participants were told it was a placebo, but this was true only if the participants had been conditioned over four sessions to believe the placebo effect worked. If they were told after only one session they had been given placebo pain relief, the effect went away.