ReviewFrontiers in psychology2020
Putting the 'Art' Into the 'Art of Medicine': The Under-Explored Role of Artifacts in Placebo Studies.
Review in Frontiers in psychology, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 8 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
8 citing papers in PubMed.
- Presenting a sham treatment as personalised increases the placebo effect in a randomised controlled trial.eLife · 2023Trial
- Placebo, Nocebo, and Machine Learning: How Generative AI Could Shape Patient Perception in Mental Health Care.JMIR mental health · 2025Article
- "Dance Well"-A Multisensory Artistic Dance Intervention for People with Parkinson's Disease: A Pilot Study.Brain sciences · 2025Article
- Working with patients' treatment expectations - what we can learn from homeopathy.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Review
- Harnessing placebo: Lessons from psychedelic science.Journal of psychopharmacology (Oxford, England) · 2023Review
- Animal-Assisted Psychotherapy for Pediatric Chronic Pain: Case Series of an Open Pilot Study to Test Initial Feasibility and Potential Efficacy.Journal of pain research · 2023Article
- Super Placebos: A Feasibility Study Combining Contextual Factors to Promote Placebo Effects.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2021Article
- A virtual experimenter does not increase placebo hypoalgesia when delivering an interactive expectancy manipulation.Scientific reports · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Research in social psychology demonstrates that physical environmental factors - or "artifacts" such as provider clothing and office décor - can influence health outcomes. However, the role of artifacts in augmenting or diminishing health outcomes is under-explored in the burgeoning discipline of placebo studies. In this paper, we argue that a careful consideration of artifacts may carry significant potential in informing how placebo effects can be maximized, and nocebo effects minimized in clinical settings. We discuss the potential mechanisms, including classical conditioning, response expectancy, and mindsets, by which artifacts might enhance or diminish these effects. Next, we propose testable hypotheses to investigate how placebo and nocebo effects might be elicited by artifacts in care settings, and conclude by providing innovative research designs to advance this novel research agendum.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.