Eli5: How do placebos’ trick our brain into thinking they do something? How do we eventually get healed if the placebo didn’t do anything in the first place?
In: Other
>How do we eventually get healed
Most common diseases self limited to start with. I run into this issue in medicine all the time. Families have been conditioned to think they need antibiotics and steroids every time they have a cough or sinus drainage. People have given them those drugs previously, and they have gotten better. But the truth is that they would have gotten better anyhow, and those drugs were not needed at all.
If you’re comparing placebo to no intervention at all, then placebo typically works more for “perception” type symptoms. Like pain, or fatigue. These are HIGHLY influenced by mood and overall disposition. The idea of having had “medicine” can greatly alter perception of symptoms.
Placebos generally help with subjective symptoms such as pain or feeling sad. The cool part is that a placebo will work even if you know it’s a placebo. So, say you tell yourself that eating a square of chocolate a day will make you feel less depressed chance are it will.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect
Your body is responsible for healing itself.
Medicine helps your body but (usually) doesn’t cure it by itself.
However, there are things that make your body weaker: Pollution, bad nutrition, lack of sleep, stress, etc.
A lot of the things that make your body weaker are related to your mental state. If you are tired and scared, your body will stress out and waste resources on keeping you awake, for example by producing a lot of hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. Those hormones are designed to keep you alive in case you are threatened by a lion and need to fight or run but don’t really help you when you are sick.
A placebo will release some of that stress because it makes you less scared: After all, you think you took some medicine and know medicine will help you. Once you are less scared, your body will relax and will not produce as many stress hormones.
You don’t need a placebo for that, either. You can learn to meditate and create a sense of peace yourself whenever you feel sick. A relaxed mind paired with enough sleep and good nutrition will help your body fight against diseases more effectively. People who are naturally relaxed like that will see no real difference between taking a placebo and doing nothing.
That’s also why people shouldn’t work or stay up late or do strenuous activities when they are sick. It will only prolong the sickness because the body will be weakened or distracted from fighting whatever is causing the disease.
The opposite can also happen: If you believe something you ate will harm you, your body will stress and it’s more likely that you feel bad or even get sick. That’s called nocebo.
Knowing that you’ve taken medication to cure an illness removes (at least some of) the stress of having the illness. Stress is generally unhealthy for the body and your immune system so taking it away aids recovery.
[removed]
[deleted]
Our moods, emotions, and feelings can have a very strong influence over how our bodies function. This influence can manifest as visible symptoms and even manifest as physical pain within the body. Basically if you believe something strong enough, your brain will start to act like it’s true and start to stimulate the body to behave like it’s true.
For example if you really think you hurt your back, your brain will start to simulate pain in your back despite it not actually being damaged.
Placebo pills can influence this by making you think you’re taking a treatment, which will make your brain respond accordingly. If the injury was not real then the brain will think it got treated and stop stimulated pain. Coincidentally this can actually work on real injuries as well where you will think a placebo is working and your brain starts masking real injuries or symptoms.
Note a placebo is not limited to just a pill. Things like faith healers, reiki energy manipulation, and whatever woowoo alternative medicine you can think of frequently act as placebos (although sometimes going in for the treatment and relaxing for a bit can help someone feel better, not because of the treatment, but because they relaxed for a bit).
1) confirmation bias: you take something and you are convinced it will help you. You start to notice little signs of feeling better. You assume it’s due to what you took. You also selectively start to look for information confirming your assumptions – while at the same time denying evidence for the opposite. (“uh my headache is getting worse despite of the pill I took. Imagine how bad it would be if i wouldn’t have taken that pill!”)
2) it reduces stress: You did something to feel better, you are convinced it will help – this immediately reduces stress and makes you feel better emotionally. The fact that you are now also relaxing can have a beneficial effect on your health and wellbeing, and it can even reduce the actual symptoms.
However, a placebo doesn’t heal you. Most things we take pills for in our everyday life (and also most things people take literal sugar pills for) are minor things that will pass by themselves, no matter what. Headache, upset stomach, a cold etc would all go away in hours or days anyways.
Placebos trick your brain into thinking you are going to feel better anytime soon – and you do, due to stress relief. Placebos are also used in actual medicine, by the way. Lots of research for example goes into the design of pills, for example (size, color, taste), because if a pill also *looks* like it will have a big effect, people usually are more satisfied by the outcome. Sadly, people also ascribe better effects to more expensive pills…
In general, the placebo pill doesn’t “trick” your brain, YOU trick your brain. Bottom line, a lot of the current medication *helps your immune system* deal with a disease, rather than the medication directly dealing with the disease. Not all of the medication, of course, but quite a bit of it, your immune system does all the heavy work, with the medication “helping”.
So if you read [this article](https://www.webmd.com/pain-management/what-is-the-placebo-effect), you’ll see that placebo pills sometimes have an effect but it’s generally for conditions where your state of mind has an effect, such as depression for example.
It does not work that way… Placebos do nothing. They do not heal, the body just heals itself in the same way it would have healed if the placebo was not taken. If the body cannot recover by itself, a placebo will do nothing, it will not heal.
Note there is a kind of opposite effect, called nocebo, were people manage to feel ill on imaginary symptoms. The prime example of this is people who claim radio waves from a brand new cell tower made them unhealthy, when the cell tower has not even been turned on, or claim they can detect radio electric fields from appliances turned on when studies in double blind show both their group and a reference group have a 50% rate of find.
Latest Answers