Many of us have heard of the placebo effect. Placebo effect occurs when a treatment or medication with no known therapeutic value (a placebo) is administered to a patient, and the patient's symptoms improve. The patient believes and expects that the treatment is going to work, so it does. The placebo effect is also a factor to some degree in clinically-effective therapies, and explains why patients respond better than others to treatment despite similar symptoms and illnesses. It has been no secret that many of the drugs that we currently take today have to be measured or tested against a placebo. The biggest enemy for the drug companies in many cases is the simple placebo pill because the majority of the times the placebos outperform the drug that is being tested. Placebos can be administered in many different ways such as in pill form, injection, liquid form orally, etc.
There have been many different experiments that test this phenomenon. One of the most famous one was done in a university where a group of college students were given non-alcoholic beer and another group was given regular beer. The setting was in a bar and to everyone's surprise the students with the non-alcoholic beer were acting drunk after a while. At the end of the experiment the students were told what the purpose of the experiment and the were shocked and embarrassed of their actions. This proves the power of the mind and the placebo effect. There have been many other experiments done to test the placebo effect and the majority of them are successful in proving it.
There is another effect and that is the antiplacebo effect. In this, the contrary happens. For example, if there is a drug that has been proven to cure a certain illness and the person believes that the pill will not cure him/her they will not be cure. There has been cases that a person is told that they have a certain illness and they end up dying of it even though they never had it. We are just beginning to understand our brain and the power it has.
You have probably heard of the word faith. It is mainly used in the religious world and it is defined on google as complete trust or confidence in someone or something. I sometimes think about the placebo effect as faith. Is it possible that science might be discovering how miracles work as they look into the placebo effect? I think they will. I have included a video that might help you understand the placebo effect and how big pharma's deal with it.
I think the whole placebo affect is pretty interesting. It's pretty crazy that our minds can tell our body whether we are going to allow a medicine to work on us or not and vise versa. I find it funny how you mentioned the experiment with the alcohol and the fact that the group with the placebo acted drunk...I've seen something like that before. Good post!
ReplyDeleteIndeed the power that our brain has is incredible and it is great that we are understanding it a lot more now a day. I find the placebo effect to be very interesting because like you mentioned the placebo sometimes outperforms the drug being tested. Which makes me question if in some cases to we really need to take a drug or just a placebo and think that we are to get better?
ReplyDeleteI found your post on the placebo/anti-placebo effect very interesting. The video you included was very informative and complemented with your blog content. When the narrator in the video was describing the various effects of placebo, I laughed when he said: "A capsule will usually beat a pill; a syringe will usually beat a capsule; and anything with a big ass science machine can outperform any of them!" and then again when he said, "Even a pill in a plain box does worse than one that's all shiny and shit." Hahaha I couldn't stop laughing! I had no idea that people could get addicted to placebos...that proves how powerful our minds truly are! "...Our minds create the medicine, and that is pretty freakin' weird!"
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