Placebos Can Work Even If you Know They’re Fakes [Health]

There’s little question that the placebo effect ‘s real, however it has always been argued that anyone feels better because they suspect the pill is the true deal. But what if it works even once you understand it’s a pretend?

According to Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School and his colleagues at the least one condition would be calmed by placebo, even when everyone knows it’s just an inert pill. This raises a thorny question: should we begin offering sugar pills for ailments without a treatment?

In the newest study, Kaptchuk tested the effect of placebo versus no treatment in 80 people with irritable bowel syndrome. Twice a day, 37 people swallowed an inert pill could not be absorbed by the body. The researchers told participants that it might probably improve symptoms in the course of the placebo effect.

While 35 per cent of the patients who had not received any treatment reported an improvement, 59 per cent of the placebo group felt better. ” The placebo was almost twice as effective as the control,” says Kaptchuk. ” That could be a good result if it was seen in an ordinary clinical trial of a drug.”

Edzard Ernst , professor of complementary medicine at the Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, UK, thinks that ” the scale of the convenience is simply too small to be clinically relevant” . Kaptchuk agrees and desires to run some larger trials to get an improved picture of the effect.

If a dummy pill can improve IBS, shouldn’t we be exploring its effect on other ailments? ” It wouldn’t work on a tumour or kill microbes, but it surely’s prone to affect illnesses where self-appraisal is critical, resembling depression” says Kaptchuk.

A 2008 study found that around a third of physicians had prescribed a dummy pill to unwitting patients . ” We have now shown that there are ethical ways of harnessing the placebo effect,” says Kaptchuk.

Surely now you can also make a case for using a placebo when there aren’t any other therapies? Kaptchuk feels there remains to be an ethical dilemma here. ” I’m against giving patients something unless it’s been shown to work in that condition,” he says, though the individuals concerned may feel differently.

Journal reference: PLoS One, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0015591

Photo by Dean812

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This post is tagged: complementary medicine, harvard medical school, irritable bowel syndrome, peninsula medical school, thorny question