Subtopic: The Dangers of Placebos

I plan to argue that placebos can be harmful to the patient and are becoming more dangerous with every use. The act of prescribing placebos has existed for years but is just recently become so widely used. The treatment, which years ago used to be strictly sugar pills, has now evolved into a much broader pool of possibilities like sedatives, vitamins, antibiotics, saline, analgesics and even what is called sham surgery. In fact, studies show that the percentage of doctors who prescribe antibiotics, over the counter pain killers, sedatives and analgesics is much higher than those who continue to use saline and vitamins. Placebos are defined as not having any specific effect on the patient’s illness but there is never a guarantee for this. It is proven that mixing medications that should not be combined can cause serious problems, including death. If a doctor prescribes low doses of actual drugs to their patient, he/she is putting them at serious risk. Even if the doctor were to research their other medications, what if at home they were to accidentally take this “harmless placebo” with another medication? Once the patient is at home, there is no doctor to guide them in taking the right combinations of medication. In addition to there being the potential of mixing medications, just using these sedatives or antibiotics alone is dangerous. For example, over time the body can develop a resistance to the “placebo” which can cause serious problems later on for the body. In following years, if there is an illness that requires a medication with the same ingredient as their “placebo”, the body could have developed a defense against it causing it to be in-effective for the illness. Finally, there is always the chance that any one of these placebos could alone react poorly with the body even if it is just a low dose. Sham surgeries are much rarer, however do occur. For incurable illnesses or those that have a very low chance of being cured, like Parkinson’s, patients often undergo these surgeries under the impression that it could pro-long their life or fix trivial matters. Again, the chance of coming across a problem while making incisions into the head during a surgery is putting the patient at risk.