Been thinking about this for no particular reason, specifically like sugar pills. Do doctors just prescribe you a medication but they’re actually lying to you? Is that legal? Or are you made aware they’re placebos and they still work? Is that possible? Are they only for people who have a legal guardian that can keep the secret? I feel like it should be obvious but I really don’t know.
(also sorry if flair is wrong, i don’t really know where medicine would fall here)
In: Chemistry
Placebos work because your brain has more power on your overall health than you think…believing a medicine will help can actually help even if the medicine itself doesn’t chemically do anything.
It is *not* legal for a doctor to give you a placebo when they tell you you’re getting a medication.
Placebos are only (legally & ethically) used during medical studies when they’re trying to find out if a medicine actually works. If you’re participating in a study like that you’ll know that it’s *possible* you’re getting a placebo but not if you actually are. The best study design is called “double blind”, you don’t know if you’re getting the placebo or not and neither does the doctor (they label the bottles with numbers so the researchers know who got what).
Weirdly, placebos can still work even if you know they’re placebos but the effect is generally less pronounced.
There are some aspects of your body’s functioning that are affected by your thoughts. Your current mindset can affect your pain tolerance (if you’re afraid that something will hurt, this makes it hurt even worse), or your heart rate (someone who is stressed out has a faster heartbeat), for example. This means that if you take a sugar pill and you’re told it’s a painkiller, you’ll think that you’re more resistant to pain and that’ll make you ignore a bit of pain. If you’re having an anxiety attack and your heart is beating like crazy, a placebo could help bring your heart rate down.
It should be noted that real medication will induce the placebo effect on top of its actual purpose too. When I have a cold and I take a Tylenol or Advil, I start to feel better immediately, before the drug should actually be taking effect, because knowing that my symptoms are about to go down affects my mindset.
When I first started working in medicine, we could write for “obecalp” and in the directions write 1-2 every 6 hours as needed for [insert condition]. The pharmacist knew to talk up the sugar pill, and it usually worked. A short while later, a study was released showing about 30% of patients reported improvement in whatever condition was being treated. Not long after that, it was decided that it was unethical to write for a “fake” medication, so the practice was banned.
What they failed to realize is that not all patient complaints require an active ingredient type of medication. Just getting someone to believe they were going to feel better often did exactly that.
It is a form of medicine that has its benefits and “did no harm.” Many of today’s medication side effects are sometimes worse than the condition being treated.
I get (and agree) that we shouldn’t ‘lie’ to our patients. But not everything needs to be cured with a pill. Unfortunately, that is the way society and modern medicine now see things.
No, doctors cannot give you a placebo if they tell you they’re giving you medication. That’s both illegal and a violation of medical ethics. Placebos are used in the context of drug trials as a control group for the drug that’s being tested. Participants in drug trials know that they might be receiving either the actual drug or the placebo but not they’re not told which one. In other words, they know that they might be getting a placebo and still choose to participate in the study.
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