Ted Kaptchuk
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"Ted Kaptchuk" (born 1947) is an author, researcher, and Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, where he focuses on the placebo effect. He earned his Oriental Medicine/Doctorate of Oriental Medicine after five years of study in China in 1975. After returning to the United States, he was clinical director of the Pain Unit at Boston's Lemuel Shattuck Hospital. In 1990, he accepted a position as the associate director of the Center for Alternative Medicine Research and Education at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. In 2011, he became Director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter, hosted at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center.

Kaptchuk has been an expert panelist for the FDA, served on numerous NIH panels, and worked as a medical writer for the BBC. He has authored over 175 peer-reviewed publications.

More Ted Kaptchuk on Wikipedia.

To some extent, placebos are about the effect of the human imagination.

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These findings suggest the medical ritual of a device can deliver an enhanced placebo effect beyond that of a placebo pill. There are many conditions in which ritual is irrelevant when compared with drugs, such as in treatment of a bacterial infection, but the other extreme may also be true: In some cases, the ritual may be the critical component.

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It may be that it is the act of applying the needles that is important.

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