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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You wouldn’t test an active ingredient against no treatment now because you wouldn’t know how much ,if any, of the effect came from the active ingredient. But there is nothing stopping people testing a placebo against no treatment since it’s the placebo effect you want to measure in that case, I presume.
Potential active medicines can be compared to a placebo *and* a control group that get no treatment at all (though nowdays they might get another already existing treatment perhaps) So the three groups could be compared. So that comparison between no treatment and a placebo treatment can be done if that’s what you were studying or may happen in normal trials. Of course a lot of research will be financed because it’s testing a possible active ingredient , testing placebos vrs no treatment seems likely a more ‘academic’ interest and possibly unethical if the participants were I’ll rather than being tested for something like response to painful stimuli.
Not only is there a placebo effect there is also a nocebo effect where the expectation of for example side effects can cause us to feel them. And quite a lot of work has been done on how the specifics of a placebo intervention can change the effect. For example the size and colour of a pill can an effect – but different colours have different effects in different cultures because of the meaning of that colour to them!
Placebos are particularly effective for conditions which involve a certain amount of interpretation and perception by the patient – for example pain. I think one of the areas still being explored is what the effect actually consists of internally. Physically a placebo seems to effect a mix of our autonomic ( not under our conscious control) nervous system, hormone production and immune responses. All things that our brain/body can do as responses to stimuli but we don’t necessarily do consciously. But significantly it’s the *expectation* rather than an actual *ingredient* that causes the effect.
I’m not a medical expert just find it interesting so I hope that makes sense and I havnt got anything significantly wrong.
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