I think, therefore I heal: The placebo effect

What is the placebo effect exactly and what does that mean for our trust in our own mental healing powers? The placebo effect spans a wide variety of medical interventions for an ailment in which the placebo itself does not contain any “active ingredient” to cure anything but causes the person to show improved symptoms because of the person’s expectations to improve. Placebos can be pharmacological (like a sugar pill), physical (such as sham surgeries where you may be opened up but nothing is actually done), or psychological (in which the doctor’s confident and warm interactions with a patient contributes to alleviation of symptoms).

Placebos have been shown to change your mental states and bodily reactions in many different ways. They can make your muscles tense, blood pressure rise, and make you feel jittery when presented as a stimulant. Presented as a depressant, the same placebo can make you feel drowsy and lower your heart rate. People will endorse therapeutic techniques such as thought field therapy, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), believing that the therapy has cured their anxiety when there is little empirical evidence supporting the techniques’ effectiveness. Homeopathic medicine is a highly valued form of alternative treatment very popular here in the Springs. You can go to Mountain Mama’s just a few minutes from school and find whole shelves of homeopathic remedies dedicated to helping you with anything from restless leg syndrome to heartburn. However, homeopathic medicine traditionally contains such diluted forms of the actual substance that many researchers and chemists believe that the ingredient is basically non-existent. Still, many people will swear that the chamomilla they use does calm their nerves and lulls them into a pleasant sleep.

However, studies have demonstrated that placebos can actually improve your ailments under a wide variety of contexts. In the State University of New York’s Downstate Medical center, Thomas Luparello and his colleagues found that when 40 asthmatics were given an inhaler containing a placebo (water vapor), their symptoms improved. And when they were told that the inhaler contained allergens, almost half of the participants experienced full-blown asthma attacks, even when the inhaler was just filled with water vapor. In another study by Crum and Langer at Harvard University, maids who were told that the work they do is good exercise showed on average a decrease in weight loss by two pounds, lower blood pressure, lower body-fat percentage, and lower body mass index compared to a group of maids who were not told anything.

So how is it possible that we can experience symptoms from events and situations that should not normally elicit those responses? Expectation and belief may help explainwhy this occurs. The placebo effect highlights the importance of the brain as a mediating factor between external medical intervention and what actually happens within our bodies. The role of expectation is oftentimes the highest predictor variable for success. If you expect to feel better, you will. In fact, the placebo effect is so powerful and works in so many situations that any trustworthy and rigorous researcher will factor it into the design of an experiment. If he doesn’t, the reader should question why that might be and how that may make the results of the study less convincing.

In some cases, the act of consistently going to a doctor’s office or simply having a positive doctor is the most effective factor that will improve your health. This is why it becomes important for the consumer to understand the importance of studies that show that some medicines or techniques are no more effective than placebo. This means that although doing nothing will not help you, just being proactive about treating your ailment could be as effective as an actual drug or surgical intervention.

All this begs the question: do you have to deceive the patient for the placebo effect to take place? Or is it enough to know that as long as I believe it works, my expectations themselves will cure, or at least alleviate, my ailment? Ultimately, it depends on the individual and his or her belief about the power of the human mind. The placebo effect is a very tangible example of how our mind and ultimately our brain can distort not only our perception of the world but physiological responses in our bodies. It can be argued that the placebo effect is unethical if you know a drug to be inert but you still tell someone that it works. It can also be argued that it would be unethical to avoid those techniques altogether if in many cases, the placebo effect does cause the person to feel better. In cases such as this, it is vital that one has a solid understanding of why a drug or therapy might work so one can make an informed decision. Or perhaps, for some people it doesn’t matter that a potential solution to their problem is not backed by any empirical evidence because they believe that it will work. And if that is the case, then does it matter whether they know what the placebo effect is?

Perhaps the best approach is to be ever-skeptical consumers of information while maintaining a healthy appreciation for our own mental powers of healing. It may be dangerous if a person or company is peddling some form of medicine and claiming that the effects are coming from something they have discovered when in all actuality, the placebo effect may be in play. In some cases, precious time, money, or lives could be unnecessarily wasted when other, more effective, forms of treatment could have been available.