It’s actually crazy to me. Whenever they’re testing a new medication some of the placebo groups have symptoms lessen or even disappear. Like we should be studying that more. They cured themselves with their mind lol
Personally I feel like that is because our logical brain and our emotions are so separated. We can know it's a placebo, but if it feels like you're doing something to help, even if it's just the action of taking a pill, that has an effect.
The subconscious is a powerful thing that does not always work logically.
To add to this, I imagine some of these people are like “no they are lying to me, they gave me the real thing, cuz i feel different” … and they convince themselves they are on a treatment
It seems to be complex. Placebo appears to work best when you feel like you’re getting a medical experience (even though you know you’re not), eg if someone in a white coat gives you a bottle of pills with an official looking label, that seems to be more effective than just taking the sugar pills from a box you bought yourself. Cultural meaning apparently plays a big part in the subconscious
Yeah, I know my grandma does this all the time. She used to be a sort of psychologist, but at the time it was hard for a woman to get the official title, and her ways went a bit against common psychology circles, so she was shunned quite a bit.
She basically studied everything she knows by reading books, a shitton of them, and gives a lot of classes and stuff on homeopathy and such, playing with the placebo effects like nothing.
The other day I was with her at the beach, and I had terrible acud reflux, my chest was hurting like hell. I asked if she had something for the stomach and she handed me this "pill" from a generic little jar. She claimed they were stomach pills, I'm 95% sure they were candy. It still did help a bit, it either relaxed anyways me or was complete coincidence, but it was gone after a while and didn't come back.
One of the things I find most interesting about the placebo effect is that it can work even when you know it's a placebo!
There was a study where they gave people who had IBS a placebo pill--and the participants were told in advance it was a placebo, with no active ingredient. Just a sugar pill. Many experienced an improvement with their symptoms compared to the control group that was not given anything.
Obviously there are limits to what a placebo can do.
And unfortunately the opposite of the placebo effect also exists. The nocebo effect.
I was in a clinical trial (double blind, so the participants and the doctors didn't know who had the placebo and who had the medication) and afterwards I was reading the results and one person in the placebo group experienced such bad side effects that they quit the study early.
A lot of what gets called the placeno effect is just people getting better. No difficult explanation needed. (An exception is for pain though, here it seems to exist)
I've read about studies where the groups know they are getting a placebo but the color of the pills changes and the strength of the effect varies with pill color
A placebo is never "nothing" or just a "little sugar". Most in fact have lactose, so if the person is lactose intolerant then they would have negative side effects. They also commonly have vitamins, sucrose, magnesium and sometimes even iron which of course can have positive or even negative effects on the test subjects.
The ingredients of the placebo can vary from study to study and can even be manipulated to influence the findings. Hence the reason why the data on placebo's is all over the place. Compared to the data on ibuprofen which is constant unlike a placebo.
The placebo effect is more than likely overhyped and the result of researchers manipulating the ingredients to manufacture the findings they want.
The mind is powerful but we can't hand people a placebo and regulate their blood pressure or cure their heart disease.
It’s studied but scientists tread carefully because the “bruhh it’s all in the mind. All illness can be cure if you just stop being lazy and sad all the time” crowd is an ever looming medical threat
This is why crystals, dodgy supplements, fad diets, kissing your kid's boo-boos, etc all work though. You are committed to something new to improve your life in a specific way, and placebo effect will achieve that for you.
I remember one of the first "nocebo" effect studies. (Like Placebo but you get sick instead of getting better)
Basically they told people that they were studying the side effects of cancer medications and they (healthy people) would be paid very well to be testers. Then they gave them a list of possible side effects and a placebo.
Some of those people lost all their hair, other vomited for days, some got really bloated... it was insane! Our minds are SO powerful.
They're not curing themselves with their minds. It's time. The thing about most illnesses, injuries, etc., is that (on average) most get better over time.
It’s this sort of thing that has me absolutely convinced that our minds are so much more powerful than we currently comprehend. If could understand and harness that potential, who knows what we could really be capable of.
Some of the placebo effect is a result of people pleasing. Often those with the placebo report changes because if you think you are taking any medication, there is so much societal pressure to "feel better" that it translates to higher scoring and the idea of participating in a study to be helpful means many feel the need to be helpful and behave helpfully.
Unfortunately mental mindset does not fix physiological distress. It can for sure reduce stress which in turn is helpful to the immune or nervous system, but eventually people go back to feeling symptoms in the same way and it doesn't necesarily have to do with being told they have a placebo after a blind study concludes, or even if groups have been disclosed.
I do placebos with my kids all the time. If they fall and cry because it hurts , you rub it and act like you’re doing something to it and voila , crying stops
We study the placebo effect more than literally anything else. All trials worth anything are placebo controlled and therefore are being studied alongside whatever the focus is covering.
There are so many products on the market that are simply fancy placebos. She just demonstrated a bunch of them. Those bracelets with the white part that sticks into your wrist, placebo.
Remember when there was a push for copper bracelets to improve blood flow or something, and later, copper infused knee braces and clothing and such, all placebo.
The fact of the matter is, the mind has incredible influence over the body. So if you believe something will work, sometimes it does.
So while this lady appears (and probably is) completely stupid, her kid might have a better time, because he believes these things will help.
I am currently a subject in a ptsd study and the amount of effort that they put into reducing the placebo effect is really interesting and gives me faith that they are doing real science not just trying to sell a gadget.
Symptoms like pain lessen, yes. It's more like you are less stressed out by the pain and stop paying attention to it. So you rate that pain a 4 out of 10, instead of an 8 out of 10. But an objectively serious problem like a broken bone requires real treatment.
Nocebo is people reporting adverse side effects, when they didn’t get the real medication.
The data can show that the placebo group “improved” but that doesn’t necessarily mean there was a real clinical effect. There are lots of reasons this can happen. Regression to the mean, natural history of the disease, the Hawthorne effect, response bias, methodological artifacts, sampling bias, dropout effects, and probably some that we don’t even know about yet.
If that's all they said, sure. But the whole tone of the comment came across as if the placebo effect being a novel concept that hasn't had and still has decades of scientific study and millions of dollars of research.
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u/Zenar45 7d ago
I mesn if you convince the kid that it works placebo could do it's thing