What the ‘placebo affect’ is and how it affects our bodies/minds
In: Biology
A placebo is related to psychosomatic medicine. Psychosomatic meaning brain, and body.
It is a fancy way of saying that your state of mind can affect/change the physiology of your body and how it is working.
A simpler way of explaining this is the saying “if you think your sick, youll get sick”. Basically if you believe your sick your, mind can influence your body to react accordingly.
So with a placebo, a drug that doesnt actually do anything, if you think that “drug” really is doing something then your body may react like it really is taking a drug.
For example you have a headache, so you want to take a pain killer. If you think youre taking a pain killer but are really taking a placebo, then you may still get beneficial results because your brain makes your body think it took a pain killer even though you really didnt.
“Positive thoughts” help a surprising amount when it comes to your own body. If you think you’re taking medicine that will help, your body simply works harder or does better at making you healthy. The body releases hormones, immune system commands, lymph nodes, and orders various bodily functions around in such a way that you get better.
This makes studying medicine difficult, as you can give someone a pill that most assuredly does nothing… but they’ll get better faster than someone who you didn’t give pills to.
It also the reason there were (are) a lot of snake-oil salesmen. They’re selling fake products. They don’t work. But if they can convince people it works…. it really will have a positive effect. They end up fooling themselves into believing they have medicine that works. They could be giving people plain-jane unaltered water. But the lie has an effect. These days though, we can’t lie to patients and fool them into thinking we have magical cures. Because actual cures have effects that are larger than the placebo effect (by definition).
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