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
The answer to this is that it mostly doesn’t. The idea of a magical placebo that actually cures you is mostly a myth. We know this because the placebo effect is strongest for subjective self-reported outcomes like pain or perceived breathlessness but basically absent when we look at objective measurements like expiratory flow rate or blood work.
The reason for including a placebo arm in trials is to capture confounding effects not related to the specific treatment under evaluation (e.g. regression to the mean, patients changing their lifestyle simply because they are being treated, expectation bias on the part of researchers etc.)
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