As a GP and therapist with over 30 years' experience, I feel the media have, in the main, missed the point of Professor Irving Kirsch's recent work (Prozac, used by 40m people, does not work say scientists, February 26) - that it is not that antidepressants may not work but that, in many cases, placebo works just as well. Why has placebo such a bad press? Far from being something we should try to avoid or play down, the placebo effect should be celebrated. It is of supreme importance in medicine. Thirty years ago GPs could prescribe an innocuous vitamin pill with plentiful suggestion to generate expectation of healing and on many occasions it would work. But it was not "scientific" enough and with increasingly slavish adherence to "informed consent", and side-effect leaflets in all prescribed medications, it became no longer possible to use this.
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