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
It’s a bit misunderstood. For a given condition and a given treatment, the “placebo effect” is the difference in experienced symptoms between a group that receives a “blank” treatment (placebo) versus a group that receives no treatment at all. The reason you want to account for this is you want to be able to account for symptoms that improve just by the perception of treatment.
So take cancer for example. The “no treatment” and “placebo” groups would be expected to continue to get worse with time while a treatment group would be expected to get better. So maybe the no treatment group reports pain and tiredness. Maybe the placebo group says their pain isn’t as bad and they feel a bit nauseous but have more energy. The treatment group is puking their guts out but their tumor is shrinking.
The “placebo effect” is not that you gave them a sugar pill and their tumor mysteriously started shrinking, it’s that they’re attributing a perceived improvement in their symptoms to the treatment, despite the fact that they didn’t receive any. It could be that they’re having a better few days than normal and genuinely feel better, it could be that the psychological impact of supposedly receiving treatment actually improves some of their symptoms. But what it isn’t doing is actually treating anything.
And that’s the big misconception, some people take the “placebo effect” to mean we can treat some diseases with sugar pills, but that’s not really what it is. It’s that people will *associate* any reduction in symptoms with a treatment, even if they’re not getting better.
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