the strange and complicated world of placebos

How can nothing be powerful enough to ease pain, treat hypertension, become addictive, and underpin pretty much everything we know as alternative medicine? Since the placebo effect was discovered in the middle of the last century, medical experts across the world’s scientific establishments had to re-think how they would evaluate the efficacy of their treatments and study how much influence our mind really has on our body. Hint, because mind and body are a package deal and the brain controls it all through a recursively complex system of cortexes and nerves branching throughout our bodies, it’s quite a lot. This is why some people can endure debilitating injuries for a surprising amount of time through sheer willpower, and why so many swear that their homeopathic concoction works when it’s nothing but water. They expect to feel better and so their bodies start to release hormones and neurotransmitters which act as natural painkillers. And not only can placebos do all that, but they also seem to be an entire research topic in medicine all of their own. Here’s a little video to shed some light on the strange and complex world of placebos and what we know about our reactions to them…

Pretty much every factoid you just saw could have a post dedicated to it in its own right because it’s very telling of how we make decisions about complex and abstract matters, but one that I wanted to briefly point out is the flip side of the placebo effect we hear very little about. It was referred to in the video and it’s often known as the nocebo effect. Nocebos can be extremely effective at making you feel worse, even if there’s nothing wrong with you, and they’re more widespread than you may think. If you’ve ever met a hypochondriac, you know someone who suffers from a nocebo of some sort, even if that nocebo itself is purely in the person’s imagination. Have you ever heard testimonials from alt med doctors about patients plagued by miasmas of toxins and feeling so much better after taking some overpriced sugar pills or shelling out thousands of dollars for a woo-tastic spa treatment over the course of several days? There you go. Placebo meets nocebo meets profit, and nothing in the patient’s body is changed. The only things the patient now has are a smaller account balance and a sunny disposition. And the more the patient shelled out, the more likely he is to feel better about the whole thing.

But wait, you might wonder, why don’t we just treat people with placebos if they’re that powerful? Why not just let sugar pills slide and let those with a touch of the nerves feel better without actually harming themselves or taxing doctors with their complaints? Why couldn’t we pronounce alternative medicine as legitimate, since it’s using a real phenomenon to make patients feel better? Simply put, because a placebo is only effective on the kinds of ills triggered or worsened by stress. Real viruses, tumors, or bacteria won’t be swayed by a placebo, and while a patient says he feels much better, he’s really just as badly off as he was when the diagnosis was made. And if we don’t warn people not to neglect their diseases and avoid quacks who promise them a quick and easy “natural, holistic” cure for whatever ails them, they might just end up feeling better all the way to the morgue, sure that because they feel better after taking that big, shiny, expensive red pill, they must be getting a lot better regardless of what those doctors paid by Big Pharma to drug people into oblivion say…