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British Journal of Pharmacology and Chemotherapy logoLink to British Journal of Pharmacology and Chemotherapy
. 1959 Dec;14(4):512–521. doi: 10.1111/j.1476-5381.1959.tb00958.x

Consistent differences in individual reactions to drugs and dummies

C R B Joyce
PMCID: PMC1481910  PMID: 14408028

Abstract

The tendency of some individuals to report changes of physical and mental state after taking pharmacologically inert substances has been investigated experimentally. In a class of healthy medical students, those individuals who reported symptoms and those who did not made significantly different scores on a number of behavioural tests. The likely reactions of the members of a second class (containing none of the previous participants) to dummies were then predicted from their scores on the same tests, some of which were found to be much more efficient predictors than would have been expected by chance. Some implications for further research and for clinical medicine are discussed.

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Selected References

These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.

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