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
There is a lot of misinformation about the placebo effect. Even scientists and doctors frequently get this wrong, and books and articles get written which are full of nonsense.
Essentially, the best explanation is that the placebo effect does not lead to real improvements in health. However, what it does do, is affect people’s answers to questions asked by doctors and scientists doing studies. People often say that they are feeling better when they take part in a study even if their health is completely unaffected – the reasons for this are not completely understood, but it may be a psychological desire to “say the right thing”, or they may feel better just because they are being distracted by going to an appointment for a study and doing stuff like answering questions and doing tests.
Properly designed clinical trials go to great lengths to record things which are *objective* – in other words, you don’t need to ask someone how they are feeling, but instead this is something which can be directly measured. For example, instead of asking how much you pain someone has, the doctor counts how many painkiller pills have been taken, or checks how many days off work someone had.
One of the interesting things that you see when you look at all the placebo studies done, is that when you compare the results off the studies with the quality of the studies – what you tend to find is that placebos improve health most in low quality studies, and the high quality studies show no effect. This suggests that placebos improving health is not a real thing, but is a false result produced by low quality scientific studies.
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