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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Placebos are essentially like when you teach a kid how to ride a bike by running with them and then taking your hands off the bike when they aren’t looking. It’s not the bike riding that’s hard, it’s the confidence to just trust that it’ll work.
Most people don’t know what their own capabilities are, and they generally don’t believe in themselves. People are full of doubt. The brain is capable of doing all the same stuff on its own. Hypnotherapy has been doing the same kind of placebo work for decades.
A placebo tricks you into believing you can do something you are already capable of, but you might not let yourself do it because of self doubt. Essentially a placebo just removes that doubt by tricking you into thinking it’s already happening. So do other things like flow states and hypnosis.
Placebos aren’t magical, but they can do some pretty miraculous stuff. With that said, not everyone responds to placebos as strongly. It’s a spectrum.
Because everything you do, everything you feel is based on how you are feeling about it in your own mind. The only reality is the the one your mind creates. It doesn’t matter how things are, only how we perceive them.
It’s looking for external validation.
You brain can try hard to convince itself “everything is ok”, but the moment you hear another person say it, you get flooded with relief.
The placebo effect is generally a short term means of using mind over matter, in the literal sense. When you are out of morphine, a shot of saline, told it is morphine, might help to tell someone that their pain is subsiding.
Its faith based healing, really. The faith is that the placebo is a real drug with known effects, so the patient believes their pain will diminish, and it does, probably because they can stop focusing on it. They can take their minds off of it. Thats the placebo..
The mind and faith CAN heal, but with placebos, a person would have to have a lot of faith in the efficacy of whatever drug it was said to be, and most patients dont know that much about pharmeceuticals for that to happen long term..
Its also considered bad medicine to tell patients they are cured or are being cured, if that is just a hope..the doctor would have to exude a huge amount of confidence to pull this off, and would also need to be excellent at convincing the patient of the same..
This is why placebos are generally only used in studies and in triage during a drug shortage.. I think its probably not easy to be a placebo administrator, on any level.
ELI5: Same reason why some people find comfort with religion. The brain needs a reason to believe.
One theory I’ll mention is that some symptoms caused/fixed by the placebo effect are often stress related or being made MUCH worse by stress.
The act of taking a placebo you’ve been told will fix you, someone validating your symptoms, and the sunk cost can all contribute to symptoms feeling better even if nothing was actually happening.
People might be depressed and stressing about qualifying for the drug trial leading up to it.
And as someone else pointed out, doctors aren’t great at identification of causes, so the body can often heal from really horrible things just by following the basics, which might have aligned with a drug trial rather than being aided by it. If those people are given the placebo you get data on a baseline
Fun fact. I once asked my doctor if they could prescribe a placebo to see if medication was actually needed. You’d have a “medicine”, and when the pharmacist filled it, they’d know it was the placebo but treat it as real for you. The whole nine yards.
She said they are legally not allowed to. I think it was related to do no harm but I can’t remember. Anyone remember what the reason is?
EDIT: googled the answer.
A placebo may still be effective if the patient knows it will be used but cannot identify it and does not know the precise timing of its use. In the clinical setting, the use of a placebo without the patient’s knowledge may undermine trust, compromise the patient-physician relationship, and result in medical harm to the patient.
Physicians may use placebos for diagnosis or treatment only if they:
A) Enlist the patient’s cooperation. The physician should explain that it can be possible to achieve a better understanding of the medical condition by evaluating the effects of different medications, including the placebo.
B) Obtain the patient’s general consent to administer a placebo. The physician does not need to identify precisely when the placebo will be administered. In this way, the physician respects the patient autonomy and fosters a trusting relationship, while the patient may still benefit from the placebo effect.
C) Avoid giving a placebo merely to mollify a difficult patient. Giving a placebo for such reasons places the convenience of the physician above the welfare of the patient. Physicians can produce a placebo-like effect through the skillful use of reassurance and encouragement, thereby building respect and trust, promoting the patient-physician relationship, and improving health outcomes.
Question… Does healing from religious areas use the placebo effect ? seems like a pretty cool interaction and it seems cool to think about lol.
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This is an outside of the way of thinking about it but worth mentioning. If you haven’t looked into any of Donald Hoffman’s research I’d recommend. Hoffman is a cognitive scientist/philosopher who has proposed a theory called the “Interface Theory of Perception.” His theory may have implications for our understanding of the placebo effect.
According to Hoffman’s theory, our perception of the world is not a direct reflection of reality, but rather an interface created by our brains to help us navigate and survive in our environment developed by evolution. Our senses do not provide us with a one-to-one representation of the world, but rather a simplified and useful version of it. This is because the brain is constantly making predictions about what we will experience based on past experiences and current sensory input.
If we apply this theory to the placebo effect, we could speculate that the placebo effect is not just a simple response to a sugar pill or other fake treatment, but rather an interaction between the brain’s predictions and the patient’s beliefs and expectations. In other words, the placebo effect may be a result of the brain creating a perception of wellness in response to the patient’s expectations of healing.
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