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
Guy who reads statistics papers sometimes.
It doesn’t. It’s a statistical artefact as far as we know.
If placebo did work then you could run an RCT, Randomized Control Trial, and see placebo outperform nothing. It’s simple: randomly separate patients into two groups, give group A nothing, give group B placebo. You would expect group B to heal faster, but it won’t.
Placebo effect is best explained by regression to the mean. It’s a very cool but intuitive concept. Extreme events tend to be followed by more usual events.
Imagine you take a group of ill kids and give them energy drinks. You will see a lot of them recovery fast. This is because the kids were very ill and most will become less ill with or without your energy drink.
Same happened with placebo. You give group A placebo. You give group B your new medicine. Group B recovers in X days. But group A recovers too. Whoa, placebo healed people! Not really.
Perhaps people knowing that they take some new medicine can be somehow affected by it. In that case placebo could be helping somehow. We just don’t see that happening
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