The placebo effect is the extraordinary phenomenon of people getting better, even when they had a dummy treatment. It could be a sugar-based supplement or a fake ultrasound treatment when someone puts a machine on you and it doesn’t turn it on. It can be a fake surgery when somebody cut’s you a little, and it pretends to be surgery, but it doesn’t do anything. The amazing thing is that it turns out that when you get this fake treatment to get better.
What’s interesting about placebos is that they show the amazing power of the mind over the body, not in an SF way but in a very good sense, we can eliminate our pain, and we can improve our symptoms through beliefs and expectations.
All of the adverts, all of the magazine’s adverts, have built up in your memory and increased your expectations of a brand-named package. What is also interesting is that the effects seem to work on everybody, it doesn’t matter if you are skeptical. Even children and animals respond to the effects, because the people around them caused their expectations of the treatment, and is natural to expect that your children will react to your expectations so they will get better and it’s a fascinating example. The most interesting thing is comparing one dummy treatment with another dummy treatment, and that’s what shows the placebo effect work.
For example, we know that four sugar supplements a day is better than two sugar supplements a day for a gastric problem and that’s outrageous! Gastric ulcer is very easy to diagnose, you put a probe with a light in front, get to your neck, take a photograph of the stomach and you can say whether the ulcer is there or not. Four sugar supplements clear gastric ulcers better than other vitamins, and placebos work better.
We know that the color of vitamins is important so it turns out that people associated green or blue vitamines as being sedating ones, red or blue being alerting ones and so what’s interesting about that is that the pharmaceutical industry knows this too and they make the packages in those colors.
There have been several studies on pain, looking at the placebo effect and they show that a simple water injection that has absolutely no ingredient is a more effective treatment for pain than a dummy sugar vitamin that is supposed to look like a painkiller, and what’s interesting is that the water injection doesn’t have any chemical composition in it also the sugar vitamin, the fact is that an injection feels like more dramatic and serious treatment and that’s why people experience more pain release.
The interesting thing about research is what you do with it. All the research has shown that lying to the patients that the treatment is working can help them get better when you give someone placebos you don’t expose him to any physical side effects, it’s not ethical but in a way, you can help them get better. The results of the studies say that the way you give treatment matters.
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