what does placebo and the placebo effect mean?
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The placebo effect is a real thing, and it means that sometimes just *believing* actually is enough to cause an effect. For example–giving someone a pill made out of sugar instead of painkillers can be enough to dull their pain, because they *believed* they were taking painkillers.
A “placebo” is that sugar pill–the thing that someone else believes will cause an effect, even though logically it should make no difference at all.
Doctor gives you a chocolate, tells you it’s medicine, and you believe them -> Placebo effect causes your symptoms to go away even though you’ve had no medicine. In this instance the chocolate is the Placebo
Placebo is normally a control group in drug testing, placebo meaning “a substance that does nothing”. Researchers don’t tell you you’re getting the placebo, they just ask you to record any changes. For example, if you’re testing the effects of a pain killer, and tell everyone they are getting a pain killer, people in the placebo group may still report that they felt less pain or their pain went away. This is then called the “placebo effect” where psychologically those people THINK they got a painkiller, so their belief leads them to have less pain even though they didn’t receive a painkiller.
A “placebo” is something that administered like a medicine, but does not actually provide a therapeutic effect. For example, giving someone a tic-tac but telling them it’s Adderall. They are often used in medical studies to act as a “control”, meaning testing to see the people who are getting better (or worse) for reasons unrelated to the potential medical treatment.
The “Placebo effect” is that some people actually do (or feel they do) see the benefit from the placebo treatment. For example a person takes a sugar pill and claims it has cured their headache, or stomach ulcer or something like that.
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