This may not sound like a good idea:
1. Find people in pain.
2. Enroll them in a study.
3. Admit you can’t do much to help.
4. Give them a fake pill.
5. Tell them that’s exactly what you are doing.
But here’s the crazy thing: It works.
For a large number of participants in these placebo trials, knowing that the “treatment” is an inert pill doesn’t stop them from feeling relief.
“For some clinical conditions, in anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of clinical trials, the placebo is just as good as the drug being studied,” said Teri Hoenemeyer, a doctoral student in health behavior at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) who is studying placebo effects in cancer survivors.
Researchers used to assume (and many still do) that this meant the drug being studied wasn’t effective. But others have produced convincing evidence that something deeper is going on.
So how could an inert pill affect the body?
No one has the answer yet, but some researchers say that they are less concerned with the exact mechanism than the effectiveness. There are, however, several theories that have been proposed. One theory is classical conditioning—that throughout your life the medications you have taken have produced a beneficial effect so your mind associates the act of taking the pill with receiving a beneficial response. Another is the idea of “nonconscious mechanisms.” This theory suggests that even though you know that the pill is fake, your imagination is engaged and the brain therefore simulates a therapeutic response.
The research is continuing, and, if it is successful, patients may one day be able to experience benefits for a wide variety of issues, including fatigue, pain, and weight loss, by taking pills that they know are fake.
This article was adapted from information provided by UAB.
