House Oversight — Estate records
HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_029925
New Yorker placebo 2011
- Pages
- 7
- Text
- Searchable
Text as released
Machine-read from the scan. Names, dates and numbers can be misread — check anything you rely on against the original page.
For years, Ted Kaptchuk performed acupuncture at a tiny clinic in Cambridge, a few miles from his current office, at the Harvard Medical School. He opened for business in 1976, on a street so packed with alternative healers that it was commonly referred to as “quack row.” Kaptchuk had just returned from Asia, where, as an exiled alumnus of the turbulent sixties, he had spent four years honing his craft. “There were lots of alternatives on that street in those days, but no practitioners of Chinese medicine,” Kaptchuk, who is sixty-four and still lives in the neighborhood, told me recently as we sipped (Chinese) tea in the study of his house. “The area is a little too L. L. Bean for my taste now,” ANNALS OF SCIENCE THE POWER OF NOTHING Could studying the placebo effect change the way we think about medicine? BY MICHAEL SPECTER he said. “It was a different place then.” Not long after Kaptchuk arrived in Boston, he treated an Armenian woman for chronic bronchitis. A few weeks later, she showed up in his office with her husband, who had a Persian rug slung over his shoulder. He nodded to Kaptchuk and said, “This is for you.” Kaptchuk accepted the rug, which he still owns, but had no idea what he had done to earn it. “Oh, doctor, you have been so wonderful,” the woman told him. “You cured me. I was about to have an operation on my ovaries and the pain went away the day you saw me.” Kaptchuk never spoke to the woman again, but he has been unable to get her out of his mind. “There was no fucking way needles or herbs did anything for that Scientists are now seriously investigating—and debating—our response to sugar pills. woman’s ovaries,” he told me, still looking mystified, thirty-five years later. “It had to be some kind of placebo, but I had never given the idea of a placebo effect much attention. I had great respect for shamans— and I still do. I have always believed there is an important component of medicine that involves suggestion, ritual, and belief—all ideas that […]