The ‘open’ and ‘close’ buttons in elevators, the ‘hurry up cross now’ buttons on street crossings and even the thermostat controls in hotel rooms may all be making use of the placebo effect, claims The Sydney Morning Herald
Tag Archives: Technology
PLACEBO AND FAKE SURGERY
Two thought-provoking articles relating the placebo effect to ‘sham surgery’, which has been canvassed in these pages previously.
In this meta-study, the authors point out that ” the literature is not chock full of studies comparing a surgical procedure to placebo. While the study of a drug versus placebo is standard practice, the picture changes radically when the placebo is a sham operation involving incisions and anesthesia … Of about 3000 articles, 53 full-text articles were selected. They represented randomized controlled studies, with both an active intervention and a placebo arm involving a sham procedure. The authors defined a surgical outcome based on three elements:
• The critical surgical component – the anatomic changes felt to result in a therapeutic effect
• Placebo component – the patient’s expectations
• Non-specific effects – changes in the natural history of an illness that might impact the outcome, the experience of being in a hospital, interactions with staff – the multitude of other factors.
In this study, the author admits that sham (placebo) srugery already occurs. Because it can work.
How?
“How can sham surgeries work? Bigness. In the same way that placebo pills and other modalities make people get better, the clinical evaluation, workup, stress and travel of surgery day, surgical prep, etc. all make for an almost unbeatable set of placebo-instituting conditions. And with some of the data which exist, sham surgeries perform better in the patients’ minds than a drug treatment that’s a comparator for the same condition.
CAN’T SLEEP? MAYBE YOU NEED A PLACEBO!
A new study published in Brain indicates that successful treatment for insomnia may not actually require complicated neurofeedback (direct training of brain functions).
Rather, it appears patients who simply believe they’re getting neurofeedback training appear to get the same benefits.
Read the whole article here.
Virtual Reality and the Placebo Effect
‘VR Placebo interventions’ …! We do indeed live in a time of wonders. Research is being undertaken into the value of the emerging Virtual Reality technologies in treatment of mental illness. It’s early days, but the results so far are promising. Read more here.