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The Meaning Response, "Placebo," and Methods.

Phil Hutchinson, Daniel E Moerman

Perspectives in Biology and Medicine

|October 9, 2018

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The "meaning response" explains placebo effects, suggesting people react to the significance of treatments, not the treatments themselves. This challenges conditioning and expectancy theories, proposing a new framework for understanding patient responses.

Area of Science:

Medical Anthropology
Philosophy of Mind
Cognitive Science

Background:

The placebo response has been explained by conditioning, response-expectancy, and the meaning response.
Dan Moerman (2002) argued the meaning response best explains placebo effects, proposing it replace "placebo effect/response."
Meaning responses are evident even without conditioning or expectation formation.

Purpose of the Study:

To address criticisms of the meaning response theory.
To reconcile the meaning response with naturalistic and cognitive science perspectives.
To propose integrating ethnomethodological fieldwork into future research on meaning responses.

Main Methods:

Literature review and theoretical analysis of existing explanations for placebo responses.

Related Experiment Videos

Examination of criticisms regarding the meaning response and the naturalistic demand.

Proposal for incorporating ethnomethodological fieldwork.

Main Results:

The meaning response offers a comprehensive explanation for placebo effects, distinct from conditioning and expectancy.
Criticisms of the meaning response often stem from its perceived conflict with naturalistic philosophical and cognitive science paradigms.
Ethnomethodological fieldwork can provide empirical grounding for the meaning response theory.

Conclusions:

The meaning response is a robust framework for understanding patient reactions to medical interventions.
Further research, particularly incorporating ethnomethodological approaches, is needed to fully validate and refine the meaning response theory.
Integrating qualitative, fieldwork-based methods can bridge the gap between the meaning response theory and naturalistic scientific inquiry.