Gar

Okay, what's the deal with the placebo effect? I read an article in Newsweek a couple of years ago (i was young, please don't judge me) about "God and the Brain" or something like that. It was the usual bullshit sensationalist tripe that's generally in Newsweek, talking about how religious experiences (praying, meditating, etc.) help cure sickness. I didn't finish the article, but i looked through it for any mention of the placebo effect. Nothing.

Anyway, the placebo effect seems incredibly interesting to me and I am surprised that ... wait, I'm not surprised that it isn't mentioned a lot in the mainstream media. I assume that most people just make up their own supernatural explanation (in cases of religious rituals) since it has not been explained scientifically. It's probably easy enough for the average person to ignore the fact that you get the same effect when you get a fake pill and believe that it's real

Does the Placebo effect get a lot of press in science magazines and the like? I'd like to find out more about it.

Bugs

A good place to start is always <a href="http://skepdic.com/placebo.html" target="_blank">The Skeptic's Dictionary</a>

Good luck.

[ December 05, 2002: Message edited by: Bugs ]</p>

Mad Kally

Some more <a href="http://www.canoe.ca/HealthAlternative/placebo.html" target="_blank"> info: </a>

[quote] The placebo effect.

When someone feels better after using a product or procedure, it is natural to credit whatever was done. However, this is unwise. Most ailments are self-limiting, and even incurable conditions can have sufficient day-to-day variation to enable quack methods to gain large followings. Taking action often produces temporary relief of symptoms (a placebo effect). In addition, many products and services exert physical or psychological effects that users misinterpret as evidence that their problem is being cured. Scientific experimentation is almost always necessary to establish whether health methods are really effective.

What is it?

The placebo effect is a beneficial response to a substance, device, or procedure that cannot be accounted for on the basis of pharmacologic or other direct physical action. Feeling better when the physician walks into the room is a common example.

Philosoft

To add to Kally's fine and functional summary, it is important to note that many symptoms of ailments are self-caused. If you have a cold, runny noses, coughs, congestion and the like are autonomic responses to the presence of viral agents in the body. While, in general, autonomic functions sort of 'run-in-the-background,' many things can affect them, including things under somatic control. Your heart beats under autonomic control, but the presence or absence of certain hormones in the bloodstream can vary the heart rate significantly. Also, you can vary the heart rate slightly by consciously varying your breathing rate.

The upshot of all this is that it's easier to understand how placebos might work under this framework. Sometimes it gets a little mystical when we think about placebos causing the body to affect the disease itself. While immune system fluctuations might also be placebo-induced, this isn't the reason for the lessening of symptoms.

thebeave

I find the placebo effect to be one of the strangest and most fascinating aspects of health and medicine. It seems to work well on ailments that cure themselves naturally, but of course it has its limits. For example, a recent cancer study showed that positive thinking has no effect on cancer recovery. Some things are beyond the reach of "mind over matter".

There is another effect called the nocebo effect. It is just the opposite of the placebo effect. You can give someone an inert pill and tell them it will make them vomit, and often times it will. Or you can cause skin rashes to appear by placing an inert material on their skin and telling them it will cause reddening. Its pretty amazing stuff really. This is often the cause of "sick building effect" when many people working in an office will report feeling sick all of a sudden from some unknown toxin or smell, but detailed investigation reveals nothing amiss. You can tell its a nocebo effect because the illness travels by line-of-sight. That is, someone barfs, which others will see, and then they start to barf, and before you know it, everyone's on the front lawn barfing over nothing.

Mr. Skinny

Hi folks, my initial post here, outside of the introduction thread.

Gar, the placebo effect is well known and is an important tool in studying the effectiveness of medicine.

To thebeave: I'm going to do some investigation of the nocebo effect you mention. I'm a safety engineer, and have recently had to deal with a "sick building" type situation. Three men in a common office area began talking about physical ailments. They discovered that they all had a similar ache in one of their testicles. Next thing you know we are having expensive air studies done.

Anyhow, thanks for the post. Learn something new every day........at least I hope to.

Aerion

When testing new drugs, the test procdure is carefully constructed to account for the placebo effect. To do this you must use three groups. One group is your control group and receives no drug of any kind as part of the test. Then you have your placebo group who only receives an inert substance and finally you have your group that acutally gets the test drug. In almost all cases, the group that gets the placebo will experience a higher cure rate/success rate than the control group even though they didn't receive any real drug. No drug is considered effective unless it substantially outperforms both the control group and the placebo group.

Oh, yes, and the people who actually dispense the drugs to the subjects and interview and test the subjects usually don't know which group is receiving the placebo and which is receiving the drug. This is what they mean when they say a test is "double blind".

thebeave

Yeah, definitely check it out Mr. Skinny. One thing you may have to deal with is convincing the "victims" that there are no external causes (e.g. bad air or water) to their problem, and that its "in their head". People often get extremely offended by this suggestion. There was an interesting case of this at a school (junior high??) earlier this year. Kids getting rashes as I recall, just by looking at other kids getting rashes. Very weird. Ultimately, it was determined by researchers to be psychosomatic and many parents came completely unglued, mostly cause they don't understand it, and it suggests (to them) that their kids are crazy. Good luck and tell us what you find out.

Mr. Skinny

Our in-house Industrial Hygienists did a rather extensive study of their workplace and also had them fill out a rather extensive survey regarding their lifestyles, in an attempt to find a common cause for their complaints. None was found.

We then did a rather extensive air quality study which included personal air sampling, area air sampling, and swipe tests. We did find some barium, titanium, and a few other minute quantities of metals in the swipe tests (btw this building is used for metals and ceramics research). Everything but the barium was expected, and I have theorized that it is a result of a barium being added to the oils used to lubricate the circulating fans used to move air in the building.

Curiously, once the IH people announced that they could find nothing in common which would cause the symptons in the three men, their symptoms disappeared.

thebeave

Interesting. Another buzzword that you can use for searching on this topic is "Mass Sociogenic Illness" (MSI). In fact, that's a better term for what happens in the "sick building" scenario than the nocebo effect. The so-called "Gulf War Syndrome" is believed to be a very huge case of MSI by leading scientists and researchers, though the general public and the victims generally can't/won't accept that explanation.