I’ve heard and read studies about it treating a multitude of mental things and lessen physical pain but like how? Is it real? I’m lost.
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Imagine you take a group of 10 kids who all have a tummy ache. You get them all together and give all of them identical little tablets that you say is medicine to fix their tummy ache. However, in truth only 5 of them got the actual medicine, and the other 5 got a piece of candy that looks exactly like the medicine.
The 5 pieces of candy are known as placebos – you made the kids *think* they got the medicine, even though they didn’t. All 10 of the kids believe they got the medicine to fix their tummy aches, and you recorded who got the actual medicine and who got the candy.
After a day or so you ask all of them how they’re feeling and compare their results with what you actually gave them. The expectation is that the 5 kids who got actual medicine will report that they feel better, while the 5 who got candy probably don’t feel better.
If that is the case, then you know the medicine was effective at treating the tummy ache. If they all report that they don’t feel better then you know that the medicine you gave was not effective. If all of them report that they feel better, then there may be other factors you need to explore to determine what cured them – sometimes giving a placebo is enough to trigger a psychological effect that makes them believe they are better, even if they aren’t actually any better.
If you believe something will work, it likely will. The “higher” levels of the brain can exert a lot of top-down control over the lower ones. Because pain is ultimately just a signal, and signals can be ignored, your belief that a medication can treat your pain can, in some cases, be just as good as *actually* treating the pain, because at the end of the day there’s no difference.
This is one of the reasons why new medications are tested double-blind (neither the patients or the researchers know who’s in what group) with a placebo. If the placebo group sees just as much of a positive effect as the real medication, now you cannot be sure that the chemical in the medication is actually doing anything, or if it’s just working because the recipients believe that it will.
A good rule of thumb is that the placebo isn’t really a thing.
It does exist but it’s effects are massively oversold by people trying to push bad science and snake oil alternative medicine.
“No one knows”.
There you go. That’s the answer. No one knows how it works.
There’s nothing else to it: it’s a thing, and it exists, but we don’t know why or how.
The actual cause of the placebo/nocebo (Placebo is positive and nocebo is negative) effects really aren’t that well understood. That being said they are absolutely real and have been studied heavily with experimental results that are consistent and get used actively in medicine. One of the most relatable instance for most people would be when getting an injection of any sort. They always tell you it doesn’t hurt because when they do is actually hurts less and they’ve also shown in nocebo studies that if they tell you it’ll hurt a lot it hurts more.
That’s the neat part… it doesn’t!
A placebo treatment is one that is known to have no actual active ingredient for treatment. The sugar pill is the famous version, but also drops of water on the tongue will do the trick.
A placebo is used to filter out the purely psychological benefits humans feel when they think they are receiving medical treatment or care, especially for testing new drugs.
For example: My new drug cures headaches in 5 minutes. I set up a trial, get test patients presenting with symptoms, give them my pill, then in 5 minutes ask them if they feel better. They all say yes. So my drug is proven to work as designed, right?
Well, not yet.
I set up the same exact trial, but instead of my drug I give everyone a sugar pill. In 5 minutes they all say they are feeling better. So now there seems to be no difference between my drug and an inert sugar pill on making people with headaches feel better quickly. What’s going on?
The placebo effect studies you hear about measure that psychological effect on people reporting to feel better after receiving treatment. When we think we are getting medicine our body expects to feel better, so in testing we have to account for this if we want to accurately measure a treatment’s effectiveness.
Placebos work great for things that have basic treatment that doesn’t actually require medical intervention. A headache will usually clear up on its own with a bit of water and some rest. Feeling anxious? Treatment is to calm down. Struggle to focus? Treatment is to remove distractions.
Or, I can give you a sugar pill for that headache, tell you to take it with a glass of water and lie down while it takes affect. I can tell you to take three drops of sugar water on your tongue and sit in a quiet room for 5 minutes to help your anxiety. I can give you a piece of chewing gum and place you in a room without distractions to help you focus.
You might attribute your improvement to the “medicine”, but the truth is you’re just taking helpful actions for brief relief that you could have taken on your own. The difference was that you felt you were receiving medical treatment.
Placebo effect does nothing for things like cancer, broken bones, infections and such, unfortunately.
I’m seeing a lot of discussion here about how the placebo effect is **proven** and not a lot on how it actually works.
The truth is we aren’t really sure yet.
Imagine if you had the flu and went to the doctor. Now let’s say that the doctor said that you need to take a handful of specific medications to help the flu go away.
Now, let say that those medications are actually just all made up, and when you take them they are purely just sugar pills.
The thing is that unless you were a doctor yourself, you would have no idea if those medications were actually real medications that could help you, so the brain will be putting a large amount of trust into this medication because the doctor told you it would be getting better. Because of this, it may decide to relieve symptoms or just stop making you feel terrible, because these medications are meant to help you feel better.
This results in you feeling better, regardless of if the medications themselves are real.
This is also why if some dude that was dressed as a witch doctor said that he had used a spell on you to make you feel better, then odds are you wouldn’t feel any better, since you wouldn’t trust him.
It’s hypnosis. Our brains affect our physical health, symptoms, and how we react to those symptoms.
Sometimes our brains will physically make us sick through stress or other mechanisms, so that is pretty easy, relatively, to clear up. We can also deal with symptoms better with a positive outlook, so even though nothing has changed in our body, how we deal with and react to symptoms can be improved.
It’s magic or a spell, not in the literal sense, though.
Mental health is connected to phyiscal health.
placebo treatment doesn’t do anything but trick you into thinking it did something, but because it changed your mental health you also see improvement in phyiscal health.
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