After some quick research on the placebo effect, I was a little shocked to find out just how powerful this effect is. http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html The scope of the effect is impressive also, fake sugar pills arent the only thing that produce placebo effects. Fake surgeries produce substantial placebo effects as well when only a cut in the skin is made during "surgery" to convince the patient they have been operated on. They patients heal themselves, with no real scientific explanation, including cancer. http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=placebo-effect-a-cure-in-the-mind So obviously this effect is there. I want to know why medicine is not using this to their advantage. Even if only 30% of all cases can be solved with a placebo, thats still nearly a third of health care costs dropped. Furthermore its quite obvious belief plays a very important role. While it may be considered unethical to lie to patients, there seems to be no other way to truly inspire belief in a patient than a direct lie from a trusting doctor. The placebo effect is a measurable effect of our bodies inherent ability to heal itself, and we should use it more to our advantage.
Fascinating research - especially the Mr. Wright example. However, surely if their use becomes common practice as you suggest (and patients realise this) placebos will lose their effects. My understanding of the matter is that an individual needs to have a firm belief that the substances they are receiving will make them better. However, if the trust between a doctor and patient breaks down, and the patient knows that its possible they are being deceived, placebos would become counter-productive.
Ok but to me, this effect points to a HUGE misunderstanding we have about the human body, and reality in general. I mean think about it, if everyone knew about these studies, actually believed it was possible, then would anyone get sick? As a society weve always had addages like "mind over matter" or "if theres a will theres a way", are these pointing to a deeper understanding of reality that we dont realize we have? I think so. And it starts with belief, and I am not talking about religious belief here.
C'mon, the Placebo Effect has got to have its limits. Otherwise, every deluded woo-woo would be able to cure cancer with crystals and water.
Geesh, dont you see thats EXACTLY what the studies are showing. Everyone is capable of healing themselves (and its got nothing to do with crystals or woo woos). This is science fact. But you are showing perfectly why it does not happen because doubt still remains in your mind. Even when its right in front and scientifically proven people still cant believe it. The body is fully capable of healing itself. Its only a matter of figuring out how to unlock our innate healing potential.
I have a question. Why does the placebo effect not work on some people? I have taken painkillers fully believing they would work, and 20 minutes later still been thrashing around in pain. Literally.
I have no idea why it only works on some people. I think a little more research is required dont you? And what you described with the painkillers seems to be an anti-placebo effect; instead of fake drugs working, you have real drugs not working, lol.
The placebo effect does not depend solely on deception or engineered illusion. I have created a placebo effect for myself, in which after deliberate conditioning I now receive very fast pain relief from aspirin - from the taste - much faster than the drug can actually work.
You have to look at studies carefully. Example: A closer look: http://altmedicine.about.com/od/alternativemedicinebasics/a/arthritis_study.htm Simply taking the results at face value may give insufficient information about the process.
This is not necessarily the body healing itself, but rather the brain healing itself. When people seek medical care their complaint is usually about pain or discomfort, which can commonly be controlled by medication without relieving the underlying cause, simply by either blocking nerve impulses that are sent to the brain or by fiddling around with the way they are processed once they get there. Obviously there's a huge psychological component to this process, and there are a number of ways of triggering the same effect without medication or faux-medication, such as prayer, acupuncture and puppies. Other complaints may also have a huge psychological component, such as insomnia and erectile dysfunction. Precivilized caregivers or "witch doctors" have been using placebos for thousands of years, in addition to their more-or-less scientific herbal remedies, with sufficiently high success rates that there's no motif in our legends about witch doctors being thrown to the lions for malpractice. Some pains are almost entirely a matter of spurious nerve impulses; others are symptoms of injuries that will heal by themselves. To treat these pains with placebos makes good sense. But other pains are symptoms of serious illness that will worsen without treatment; placebos may be used for the pain but the patient still requires proper medical care.. And of course other pains represent ailments that will indeed get worse, but there is no cure; in that case anything that gives a terminally ill patient comfort is okay--and from the standpoint of those waiting to inherit his estate, the cheaper the better.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! As for cancer, last time I checked the latest wisdom it was called a family of virus-caused illnesses that are only beginning to be dimly understood. Sometimes they go into remission with no obvious reason; other times there are reasons we don't understand. Correlation with placebo administration may be pure coincidence, even if it happens in thousands of patients. Or it might be that the comfort brought by the placebo heals the immune system. Lately we've discovered that everything from allergies to lupus is a malfunction of the immune system, so who knows if the same revelation will apply to cancer. Compared to chemistry and physics, biology is still not very far advanced from the Dark Ages. This is predicted to be the Century of Biology (as the 20th belonged to the physicists and the 19th to the chemists), so you younger people will hopefully live to see some of these questions finally answered definitively. In the meantime, the quandary remains over how to deal with the Placebo Effect. If we institutionalize the use of placebos the information can't help but become more widely known, and surely the effect will be mitigated. But it's worth looking into, because placebos have one clear advantage over real medications: no six-inch list of nasty side-effects.Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
There is a lot of evidence that the "placebo effect" works by causing the brain to do something to its own opioid receptors. There was a pretty famous experiment where some doctors injected people with water but told them it was morphine, and not surprisingly the patients reported that they felt less pain compared to the patients who got no injections. When they switched from injecting them with water to injecting them with an opioid blocker, the placebo effect went away and they reported just as much pain as the subjects who hadn't been given any injections. So it appears that the placebo effect has something to do with the brain's opioid receptors, although it's not clear what. Yeah, the real problem seems to be that you could never prescribe any type of placebo long-term, because pretty much anyone who was prescribed something they've never heard of would hop on the internet to research the drug. Once they find that the drugs don't actually exist, the game's pretty much over. But it's worth noting that the placebo effect can do pretty wild things beyond simply blocking pain. There was one experiment where some scientists injected rats with an immune system suppressor every time they fed the rats sweetened water. After they did this for a while, they were able to make the rats suppress their own immune systems on demand by simply giving them sweetened water. Interestingly, the rats couldn't have possibly had any expectations about how the sweetened water would affect them, so it seems that the brain doesn't even have to be consciously aware of what's going on to be conditioned to have a placebo response. They repeated it in humans, giving them a funky-tasting drink with a histamine blocker in it. After a few days of drinking it, the researchers were able to produce antihistamine effects in the humans by simply giving them the funky drink even when the drink didn't have any histamine blockers in it. And the wild part is that the people were never even told there were histamine blockers in the drink - again showing that a person's conscious expectations about what the drug will do isn't always necessary for the placebo effect to work.
