I have several ongoing projects related to the placebo effect. I am leading a project funded by the Fonds de recherche du Québec – Santé (FRQ-S) examining ways in which the placebo effect poses challenges for medicine as it stands. In particular, the project delves into challenges related to 1) the methods of medicine, particularly the randomized-control trial, which prioritizes treatments that fail to incorporate placebo mechanisms, 2) the boundaries of medicine, as complementary and alternative practices seek legitimacy in placebo research, 3) longstanding biases within medicine, as underfunded, stigmatized conditions are found to respond better to placebo treatments than available ones.

I began work on the placebo effect within my dissertation, within which I considered several prominent accounts of the placebo effect that have been put forward and argued that none of them are able to adequately account for the diverse instantiations of the phenomenon that we are now learning about. I then offered a novel account, suggesting that we ought to think of the placebo effect as encompassing three distinct responses: conditioned placebo responses, cognitive placebo responses, and network placebo responses. I also considered implications of the placebo effect’s role in complementary and alternative medicine for discussions of how to demarcate between science and pseudoscience within philosophy of science and offered a bioethical argument that maintains that the neglect of the placebo effect within medicine may be contributing to an increase in health disparities along lines of race and ethnicity.