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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Many people have answered your question but I’ll say this I learned about placebo. You can tell someone that you’re giving them a placebo but to imagine it is a treatment and still sometimes get a placebo effect out of it.
My wife is a Physician Assistant. Once I was having a panic attack at a family retreat. I didn’t have any anti anxiety meds with me. She reached into her purse and pulled out ibuprofen. She said “you know this is just ibuprofen, but I want you to imagine it is your anxiety medication.” I took the ibuprofen and in under five minutes I was calm. I felt the ‘drug’ kick in the same way my lorazepam does. It was crazy.
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A battle for dominance between the conscious and unconscious mind?
After reading a few comments, I haven’t seen anyone mention this: the placebo effect still occurs even when the patient is aware it’s just a placebo. It works better when the placebo takes a certain form (eg: sugar pills have a stronger effect than drinking sugar water; if I recall correctly, IV sugar water works better than pills). So we really don’t know why it works the way it does.
Briefly, it is not that strong of an effect. It has come under fire recently as perhaps even more limited, it may only be a real effect for subjective states like happiness or pain. Furthermore, if a drug needs to be shown to be effective, it must *outperform* this null effect.
If you go to a good hypnotist, they will make some suggestions to you which you won’t necessarily notice. They’ll suggest some different ways of thinking about things. As a result, your problems will seem diminished or they’ll even disappear. They might go away so easily that you’ll forget it was ever a problem.
You were always capable of seeing things in a different way, and you were always capable of healing. The suggestion is just the tiny push that it takes to step outside of your worldview. Then all kinds of things are possible.
The Placebo Effect Works Even When You Know You Are Taking A Placebo:
https://www.iflscience.com/placebos-work-even-when-you-know-they-are-placebos-29650
The only real answer is we don’t know. We don’t know why some people get better who shouldn’t statistically speaking while getting fake medicines. It is not what others have said that people often get better . It’s that if you give 500 people no medicine and 500 others fake medicine there should not be a difference in how many of them heal. In practice for some reason there is one, and we don’t really know why.if you google it you will find lots of theories but there isn’t a universally accepted one.
This whole thread is pretty much misinformation. There are countless studies that show the placebo effect can affect physiological issues and not just mental issues. That’s not even that hard to contemplate. A headache is caused by real inflammation in the brain which can be triggered by emotions/stress. It’s not at all surprising that that same inflammation can be reduced by changes in thinking, which the placebo effect can impact. Emotions, stress, etc. impact inflammation, hormonal responses, muscle tension and countless other physiological responses. Healing Back Pain by Dr. Sarno (professor at NYU med school) discusses this extensively.
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