Feeling sick? Take a sugar pill, you’ll feel better.
The unexplained phenomenon of the Placebo Effect wherein fake drugs, treatment, and therapies can miraculously help to relieve illness.
During WWII, on the North African battlefield, morphine was scarce — not nearly enough to supply the extremely high number of wounded soldiers. Army doctor Henry Beecher had urgently needed to operate on an injured soldier, whose life was on the line, however the facility had run out of drugs to numb the area.
A desperate nurse grabbed a vile of saltwater, filled a syringe and after injecting it into the soldier’s arm, the pain had washed away.
Post-war, when Beecher returned to Harvard University, he decided to explore this mysterious miracle. Diving into his studies, he found a large range of ailments from gunshot wounds to the common cold could be treated with this similar fake medicine.
In fact, the discovery of this Placebo Effect dates back to the 1700s, when counterfeit drugs were administered to improve people’s symptoms when proper treatment wasn’t available and was found to be weirdly successful.
The workings behind the Placebo Effect.
Obviously, it doesn’t make sense. How does medicine that’s not supposed to have any effect actually make us feel different?
The trick lies behind our mind — if a person believes the treatment is real, their expectations trigger physiological factors which twist our symptoms modulated by the brain, including our perception of pain and stress. The power of the effect can increase the release of natural pain-reducing chemicals such as endorphins, and reduce stress hormones such as adrenal, all of which can slow the harmful effects of a sickness. Even symptoms in Parkinson’s patients can be mitigated by causing higher levels of dopamine, a chemical messenger.
Play the part, look the part.
The dud typically contains all the inactive ingredients of the real pill, but the active ingredients are left out, which are what ultimately cause effects on the body. To make up for the missing components, often sugar is used as a substitute, which is how placebos earned their title of “sugar pills.”
For someone to be convinced of a placebo, it had to mimic the real treatment. As humans, our perception is that the more “sophisticated” the drug looks, the more “effective” we believe it will be.
Form of the fake medicine
If you give someone a placebo capsule it would have a higher success rate than placebo tablets. Placebo injections work better than placebo capsules. And placebo machines (yes people made giant, complicated machines just to trick others) work better than placebo injections.
Pill color
When designing a placebo, it’s important to consider the coloring as well, as our minds subconsciously classify certain pill colors to create a certain effect. For instance, sleeping pills work best if blue, stimulant pain relievers work best if red, and anti-depressants work best if yellow.
The list continues…
Other factors such as taking two pills as opposed to one, creating placebos stamped with brands versus cheap generics, and designing fancy packaging to make the placebos look legit are all things we notice to judge its level of “sophistication.”
Even having a nice long talk with the doctor before taking a placebo can drastically increase its results.
Taking advantage of the effect in clinal testing.
Because of the Placebo Effect, it becomes very difficult to test the performance of new drugs with limited bias. If you gave the tester a pill it would be challenging to distinguish whether they genuinely felt a positive response due to the drug, or it was simply their brain playing games on their reaction.
So people had to create a strategy to work around this obstacle.
- Half the people would be given the real treatment, while the other 50% would be taking a dud.
- Because patients wouldn’t know whether they’d received the real drug or the fake, the results wouldn’t be biased.
- If the actual drug showed significant benefit compared to the placebo, it would be proven to be effective.
Nowadays, ethical concerns have arisen, and so it’s been less common to use placebos in this way. Those who would be volunteering to act as a tester, would need to have an ailment, however they are told that they will be receiving real treatment when they might just be taking a clump of sugar. In this case, comparing older drugs to a more recent one is still more preferable to giving someone no treatment at all.
However, despite if we continued to use the Placebo Effect to our advantage in clinical testing, we would find that more drugs are failing to pass the placebo test.
“It’s almost as if the Placebo Effect is getting stronger.” — Dr. Joseph Hanson, PhD
The success of placebos over real drugs.
Over time, more fake drug companies have been advertising their pills to the general population. In fact, drugs such as Prozac perform worse today in placebo tests compared to when they first came out roughly 30 years ago. The increased and more compelling marketing, spread, and accessibility of the media, along with living in an exponentially growing society have increased our expectations of what medicine can do.
We gain more trust in the drugs which we see through our screens, and the placebo effect is strengthened, making it harder to researchers to figure out which drugs really work.
And even more weird, when current patients are handed placebos, which they were told were fake, they still felt real results.
The key ingredient in the Placebo Effect is expectation. Whatever we believe does in fact come true — our mind ultimately tricking itself that we feel better. Placebos could potentially make patients feel worse if they imagined a drug that would cause harm and that’s what they were expecting.
Placebos convince, but don’t cure.
Despite becoming more effective, we still can’t say they’re real.
While sugar pills do stimulate the brain and create pain and stress relief, they will never help with the curing of actual bodily issues — they don’t have abilities to kill cancer cells or heal infections. And typically the results are extremely short-term, fading over time.
Also if someone falls under the placebo spell, believing the “medicine” which they previously took had cured them, they may miss out or refuse to take any other form of treatment which are proven to actually work.
However, the main piece is that it’s unethical to prescribe a patient one thing and tell them they’re taking something different. White lies like those…are called deception, and usually frowned upon.
So should we still use the Placebo Effect?
Well, technically we don’t have to completely ignore the power of this effect. Doctors believe parts of the Placebo Effect can still be used without turning every practice into a carnival game. While we probably can’t give out fake pills and claim they’re real, doctors can however talk to their patients more before administering treatment, to enhance its effects.
There’s so much we have yet to discover about this fascinating phenomenon, and how our mind can have so much power over us to the point where a simple water injection can relieve pain. In addition to all the amazing medicines we’ve developed and perfected, it’s nice to know the brain has some quality treatment built into itself as well.
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Hi, it’s Ashley thanks so much for taking the time to read this article. If you enjoy this content, make sure to follow so you don’t miss any new great stories!
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Email: moas@utschools.ca
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