Why Placebos Work Wonders

[Celebration]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204720204577128873886471982.html?mod=googlenews_wsj

Excellent article on the placebo effect in the Wall Street Journal today. I recommend reading the whole thing, but I found particularly interesting some things that were said about diet, exercise, and weight.

Hotel-room attendants who were told they were getting a good workout at their jobs showed a significant decrease in weight, blood pressure and body fat after four weeks, in a study published in Psychological Science in 2007 and conducted by Alia Crum, a Yale graduate student, and Ellen Langer, a professor in the psychology department at Harvard. Employees who did the same work but weren't told about exercise showed no change in weight. Neither group reported changes in physical activity or diet.

Patients in a recent study were treated with placebos for an induced asthma attack. They reported feeling just as good as when they received an active treatment with albuterol.
.Another study, published last year in the journal Health Psychology, shows how mind-set can affect an individual's appetite and production of a gut peptide called ghrelin (GREL-in), which is involved in the feeling of satisfaction after eating. Ghrelin levels are supposed to rise when the body needs food and fall proportionally as calories are consumed, telling the brain the body is no longer hungry and doesn't need to search out more food.

Yet the data show ghrelin levels depended on how many calories participants were told they were consuming, not how many they actually consumed. When told a milkshake they were about to drink had 620 calories and was "indulgent," the participants' ghrelin levels fell more—the brain perceived it was satisfied more quickly—than when they were told the shake had 120 calories and was "sensible."

The results may offer a physiological explanation of why eating diet foods can feel so unsatisfying, says Ms. Crum, first author on the study. "That mind-set of dieting is telling the body you're not getting enough."

[CanSocDem]

1. There's an industry under threat....

...with all this research into "placebos".

"Right now, I think evidence is that placebo changes not the underlying biology of an illness, but the way a person experiences or reacts to an illness," Dr. Kaptchuk says.

This "evidence" suggests that NO biological effect is immune to the 'placebo effect'. If the medical science research departments weren't so focused on reworking patents or grandstanding for market share, they might want to look closer at this phenomenon.

Trouble is, they'd eventually discover that everything they hold dear, everything they worked so hard to produce, everything connected to Modern MedicineInc., is itself, a placebo.

So they continue doing what they do best; making up diseases and making up the cures.


.

[Celebration]

2. and labeling a disease

apparently could also have an effect.

If different language used in describing something to a patient can have physiological effects (as in the type of diet), simply getting a label from a doctor for a disease could reinforce the symptoms and make it more imprinted into the psyche.

All in all, the implications of the research are pretty huge.

[RainbowSuperfund]

3. Exploring the way a change in perception creates a change in the body.

This is a fascinating article.  Thanks for sharing it.  I've wondered for a long time why so much time was spent trying to rule out placebo effects in tests instead of trying to enhance the effect for healing purposes.  If you know it works why eliminate it?  Use it.  I was especially interested that fake acupuncture has a lasting effect in 55% of participants while real acupuncture had a lasting effect in 73%. 

[handmade34]

4. interesting article

and I have firm believe in the "power of positive thought"... but interestingly enough, the comments after the article become quite political and much can be garnered about the differences in conservative/liberal thought contained in the reaction to the placebo effect... very ironic...

[Celebration]

5. People do have strong opinions about this

I am not sure that it follows that it is a conservative/liberal dichotomy, however.

This comment amused me, though.

"I go to the Dr when I have a genuine ailment; so unless I can pay with fake money,
he better not be foisting a placebo on me."

LOL. Our whole currency seems a little fake to me. It isn't backed by whole assets and is simply called a Federal Reserve Note. I would say it is placebo money. It SAYS it is legal tender, so it is. But there seems to be no intrinsic value. But by labeling it as money it becomes such, and works in transactions.