People in control groups are usually given a sugar pill and are observed to assess if any changes occur to their health during the experiments. How do we know that these changes, if any, were the result of taking the sugar pill and not just random changes that might have happened even without taking the placebo? Are there any studies that prove that the placebo effect really exist?
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The basic answer to your question is “statistics”.
If you run a test on one person, anything you see could be caused by a lot a things. However, if you test tens, hundreds, or even thousands of people; the chance that there is something causing a major difference over the entire group of people grows increasingly unlikely.
THink about it like this: if you flip a coin 10 times and get 6 heads, that coin may or may not be weighted – but if you flip it 1000 times, and get 600 heads, it’s a lot more likely that coin is weighted.
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To test the placebo effect, you divide a large group of people suffering some minor complaint into two groups. One group gets nothing, the other group gets “medicine” (usually sugar pills; sometimes another nonmedical substance). Then, you check back to see how each group did. And there are studies that show that the group that gets the placebo ends up doing better, on average.
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