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
We don’t know.
Really, that’s the best example you’re going to get. We really don’t have a god damned clue. We know it *exists*. Clinical trials have to account for it in their methodology. But we don’t know.
There are really two types of placebo effects. The more “common one” is really psychological. It’s perception. We can’t get inside someone’s brain and accurately measure their pain levels, but a lot of things are just..perception. When you break a bone you have to deal both with the broken bone and the pain. The bone is physical, the pain is neurochemical.
So given a “pain killer” that isn’t actually a pain killer *has been known* to decrease what the patient perceives as their pain level. It’s all neurochemical after all. Pain’s just the brain interpreting things, and what we’ve found is there’s a real intersection between how someone perceives reality and how someone *thinks* they should perceive reality. So someone who thinks they’re given a pain killer might legitimately believe they’re in less pain.
We kinda understand this one. We’re not sure of the exact interplay of mechanisms here but like. your brain is your ouchie place and also your thinky place and it’s not entirely unreasonable to think there’s some interconnection between the thinky and the ouchie parts. You think you’re in less pain so you…are. We don’t ENTIRELY know why, but it’s all just a bunch of chemicals swimming around in meat jelly so. Weird shit happens.
The placebo effect we absolutely do not understand is that there is a non 0 impact on someone’s *actual health improving*. Like we kiiiiinda get “here this pill will help you with the pain” might cause the patient to perceive less pain, even if the pill is fake.
But we’ve found there exists a statistically significant number of incidents of “here this pill will help your arm heal faster” *and then it does* even though there was no medicine involved. And that’s not just perception. That’s actual tangible medical results from literally no actual medical intervention what so ever.
That one we have not a damned clue about.
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