Placebo Power: How You Can Improve Your Health Through Belief

Think about many thousands of Americans buying a particularly expensive prescription medicine over the Internet from a foreign source to save considerable money. Later it is discovered that the drug was a fake, some harmless material. An investigation of how the fake drug has harmed people discovered that a significant fraction of users have had their symptoms completely eliminated by taking the fake drug. They thought the drug was real. And it worked just fine. Scientists have called this phenomenon the placebo effect, getting a beneficial result that seems unfounded.

Every time a company goes through the very complex government process of getting a new drug approved part of the testing is to include some people who get the real drug and some control subject who get a harmless and fake substitute, but the physicians do not know which is which. Virtually all the time some of the people getting the fake drug do just as well as those getting the real one. Once again, the placebo effect has surfaced. Of course, the data must show a lot more positive results from the real drug than from the fake one, and of course no serious problems with the real one.

Researchers at the University of Connecticut examined 19 clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that an amazing 75 percent of the drugs’ effectiveness was caused by the expectation of improvement, rather than any changes in brain chemistry. An earlier study of depressed patients treated with drugs, psychotherapy, or a combination of them found that 50 percent of the drug effect was a result of – you guessed it – the placebo effect.

A number of studies of dummy pills found that they had the ability to speed up pulse rate, increase blood pressure, and improve reaction speeds when participants were told they had taken a stimulant. If people were told that the fake pills they had taken was a sleep-producing drug, they had the opposite physiological effect.