Taking a sugar pill can sometimes lead to real improvements in health. How does believing in a treatment, even when it’s fake, trigger physical changes in our bodies?
In: Biology
To be honest a lot of evidence of the placebo effect is showing there’s only really significant effects in measurements of subjective experience. i.e. testing how well painkillers work.
Other effects observing medicine “working” can be chalked up to things like having a functional immune system for recovery. For example, you could take a medicine that doesn’t work to treat your cold. Regardless of it working or not, you’re going to get better in a few days because it’s just a cold.
Sometimes people with cancer go into remission spontaneously. That is the “placebo effect” being tested against, the baseline level of recovery.
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