If the placebo effect works by tricking the brain, why does it need to be tricked if it’s apparently able to solve the issue on its own?
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I think there are a number of things going on and they are at the interface , if you like, of subjective experience and autonomic (involuntary) function. It’s worth bearing in mind (no pun intended) that consciousness is only one part of what makes us , us… how we experience ourselves – but we are our in fact our *whole* body and that body works sometimes with conscious choice and other times without with a very blurred line in between.
One of the things that placebo has the most effect on if how we consciously experience or interpret our pain – our emotional state can influence this. Secondly, we are not just our conscious experience we are our autonomic ( involuntary) systems that are not generally under voluntary *conscious* control but can still be stimulated to work involuntarily by things like expectations – even expectations or other signals we aren’t very aware of. In this way placebos may stimulate hormone production ( also connected to pain) or immune responses but it’s limited to what the body already can do under the right conditions rather than for example simply ‘cure’ cancer.
Im not sure I’m doing a great job of explaining simply but you have to realise that our consciousness is only one part of ‘us’ and our body can be prompted to internally produce certain biological effects without the conscious part being fully aware of what’s going on. Harnessing those ‘prompts’ , exploring the definite limits and the best way to use these processes is something we are studying.
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