Editing Nocebo (section)

==Ambiguity of medical usage==
Stewart-Williams and Podd argue that using the contrasting terms "placebo" and "nocebo" for inert agents that produce pleasant, health-improving, or desirable outcomes and unpleasant, health-diminishing, or undesirable outcomes (respectively) is extremely counterproductive.{{sfn|Stewart-Williams|Podd|2004}} For example, precisely the same inert agents can produce [[analgesia]] and hyperalgesia, the first of which, on this definition, would be a placebo, and the second a nocebo.{{sfn|Colloca|Benedetti|2007}}

A second problem is that the same effect, such as [[immunosuppression]], may be desirable for a subject with an [[autoimmune disorder]], but undesirable for most other subjects. Thus, in the first case, the effect would be a placebo, and in the second a nocebo.{{sfn|Stewart-Williams|Podd|2004}} A third problem is that the prescriber does not know whether the relevant subjects consider the effects they experience desirable or undesirable until some time after the drugs have been administered.{{sfn|Stewart-Williams|Podd|2004}} A fourth is that the same [[phenomena]] are generated in all the subjects, and generated by the same drug, which is acting in all of the subjects through the same mechanism. Yet because the phenomena in question have been subjectively considered desirable to one group but not the other, the phenomena are now being labeled in two [[mutually exclusive]] ways (i.e., placebo and nocebo), giving the false impression that the drug in question has produced two different phenomena.{{sfn|Stewart-Williams|Podd|2004}}