The Placebo Effect …the story continues
We return this week, dear reader, to one of my favorite topics, the placebo effect. I have written about this elsewhere (more specifically, in this link and this one).
You can imagine my joy, therefore, when I found this article which mentions it as well.
Being the UK Guardian it is a serious and concerned article which could be easily mis-represented by quoting odd bits. I shall try to avoid doing that by ignoring almost completely the bulk of the article and going just to what I like; the bit about placebo.
However, I must just say that it was to do with a study on back pain and how various treatments affected different results. One treatment was genuine acupuncture and another was fake acupuncture. The latter looked pretty good but was really
Guess what? Surprise!!! The fake acupuncture was just as effective as the real acupuncture.
The central paragraphs are worth repeating because they are just so juicy…
There are three possible explanations for this finding. One is that sticking needles in your body at random helps back pain due to some physiological mechanism. The second is that theatrical ceremony, reassurance, the thought of someone doing something useful, helps back pain. (The third option is “a bit of both”.) Now as I have said so many times before, the placebo effect is not about a sugar pill, it’s about the cultural meaning of a treatment, and our expectations: we know from research that two sugar pills are more effective than one, that a salt water injection is better for pain than a sugar pill, that colour and packaging have a beneficial effect, and so on.
Interestingly, there has even been a trial on patients with arm pain specifically comparing a placebo pill against a placebo ritual involving a sham medical device, modelled on acupuncture, which found that the elaborate ritual was more effective than the simple sugar pill. “Placebo” is not a unitary phenomenon; there is not “one type of placebo”.
At this point the article went off again looking at reasons why the original experiment was flawed. But the quoted text above is really interesting, isn’t it?
Look at what it says. That there’s not one type of placebo (which I more or less guessed anyway), but that the more ‘fiddly bits’ are introduced, the better the effect becomes. In other words, the more the person thinks they are being treated with care and consideration (OK, OK, I put that last word in myself, but I think it’s fair to add and I’m sticking with it), the better they become!
Now, what I’d like to know next is does the placebo effect work on everyone or just on a certain percentage of the population? After all, only 5% of the population have been shown to exhibit any tendencies to actively pursue change in their lives and do whatever it takes to change, so does the placebo effect affect the 95% of people who can’t be bothered to change and rely on others to do it for them?
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