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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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.
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