Table of Contents

Cory Harris and Amir Raz: Preface
Anne Harrington: Foreword
Part I: Introduction
1: Cory harris and Veronica de Jong: Placebos and beyond
Part II: The Practitioner Lens
2: Irving Kirsch: Antidepressants and the placebo effect
3: Veronica de Jong and Amir Raz: Active expectations: Insights on the prescription of sub-therapeutic doses of antidepressants for depression
4: Bennett Foddy: Justifying deceptive placebos
5: Marie Prévost and Amir Raz: Trust and the placebo effect
6: Natasha Campbell and Amir Raz: Placebo science in medical education
Part III: The Cultural Lens
7: Daniel Moerman: Looking at placebos through a cultural lens and finding meaning
8: Laurence Kirmayer: Unpacking the placebo response: Lessons from ethnographic studies of healing
9: Stewart Justman: Pills in a Pretty Box: Social Sources of the Placebo Effect
10: Steve Silberman: Healing words: the placebo effect and journalism at the mind-body boundary
Part IV: The Placebo Lens
11: Cory Harris and Timothy Jones: Placebolicious: the many flavours of placebo in diet and food culture
12: Elizabeth Loftus and Melanie Takarangi: Suggestion, Placebos, and False Memories
13: Edward Shorter: Fetish as Placebo: The Social History of a Sexual Idea
14: Michael Orsini and Paul Saurette: 'Take two and see me in the morning': Reflections on the political placebo effect
Part V: Concluding Remarks
15: Amir Raz: Placebo Science: New paradigms and future directions

About the Author

Professor Raz earned his Ph.D. in Brain Science from the Interdisciplinary Center for Computational Neuroscience at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem under the supervision of the late Professor Shlomo Bentin. He then went on to a post-doctoral fellowship with Professor Michael Posner at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University, where he took on a faculty position thereafter. He then joined the faculty at Columbia University in the City of New York and
later became the Canada Research Chair at McGill University in Montreal, Canada. Cory Harris became interested in placebo effects while studying traditional medicines in collaboration with First Nations
Elders and Healers in Québec, Canada. While their research on herbal medicine revealed a wealth of pharmacological activity, the therapeutic value of traditional healing extended far beyond bioactive molecules. Cory earned his Ph.D. in Biology and Biochemistry before completing post-doctoral fellowships at McGill University's Centre for Indigenous Peoples Nutrition and the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research in Montréal. In 2013, Cory joined the Department of Biology at the
University of Ottawa, where his research continues to explore Indigenous and alternative medicine using an interdisciplinary lens.

Reviews

Books of collected papers are rarely either cohesive or persuasive. This one - like the placebo effect itself - defies the rules. It is a book of big ideas with considerable implications.
*Martin Cohen, The Philosopher.co.uk*

These accounts by some of the best scholars in the field, make for a cogent triangulation of the qualities and virtues of placebos across a wide range of disciplines relevant to human behaviour.
*Anticancer Research, Vol. 36 (2016)*