According to Ann Helm of the Oregon Health Sciences University, somewhere between 35 and 45 percent of all medical prescriptions are placebos. That estimate was made in 1985. In 2003 a survey of nearly eight hundred Danish clinicians, published in Evaluation and the Health Professions, found that almost half prescribed a placebo ten or more times per year. A 2004 study of Israeli doctors, published in the British Medical Journal, determined that 60 percent had prescribed placebos, more than half of them doing it once a month or more. Of the Israeli doctors who prescribed placebos, 94 percent
...more
