Ted J. Kaptchuk is a Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School and Director of Placebo Studies, Healing and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, in Boston, Massachusetts. He is also a lecturer in the Department of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School. His scientific and scholarly career has involved a multi-disciplinary investigation of placebo effects that integrates concepts, research designs and analytic methods drawn from the basic, clinical, and social sciences as well as the humanities. Work performed by his teams has transformed the contemporary understanding of placebo effects in relationship to clinical implications (e.g. BMJ 2006, 2008, New England Journal 2011, Science Translational Medicine 2014), and neurobiological mechanisms (e.g., Journal of Neuroscience 2006, 2008, PNAS 2012, Molecular Biology 2013). His team’s work has pioneered the use of the social sciences methods in placebo studies (e.g., Culture, Medicine and Psychiatry 2009, Social Science & Medicine 2010, Social Sciences and Medicine 2012) and performed groundbreaking studies in the humanities and bioethics. (e.g., Bulletin of the History of Medicine 1998, American Journal of Bioethics 2012, Journal of Bioethics 2010, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of Medicine Part B 2012.) Ted is also a scholar of East Asian medicine, an academic authority of medical pluralism and has served on numerous NIH and FDA committees.
