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.
All posts by Michael Doneman
Placebo marketing by Big Pharma
A scary story in Salon about overt corporate deception in the marketing (even just the *naming*!) of certain drug products – as in the ‘repackaging’ of Prozac by Eli Lilly to exploit new markets. As in other, non-pharmaceutical marketing, cultural expectations play an enormous role.
‘I suggested to Moerman how odd it is that the meanings we ascribe to a pill can sometimes be more powerful than its active substance, especially in the realm of psychopharmacology.
“Well, James, you’re an anthropologist, right? You know the power of meaning! Every culture has its symbols and objects of veneration and it is no different with us. Once, for us, we revered crosses and statues of the Virgin Mary, but now pills and stethoscopes capture our worship. So even an inert pill can affect us because it has shape and form and a context, and it has language attached. It comes in a blue box or a pink box, it’s taken in a pharmacy, doctor’s room, or hospital with all the panoply of a thousand years of medical tradition behind it to give it overwhelming symbolic weight.”‘
Placebo and the doctor …
Yet more science on the placebo effect, with a focus on “the impact of the reputation, charisma and convictions of the doctor administering (placebo)”.
“The concept of the self being an autonomous being is a deeply held belief in western civilisation, but we affect each other all the time.”
The placebo effect in marketing
Online marketing guru Seth Godin talks openly here about the placebo effect and its relation to modern marketing. He says that, “(As marketers) … we don’t like to admit that we tell stories, that we’re in the placebo business. Instead, we tell ourselves about features and benefits as a way to rationalize our desire to to help our customers by allowing them to lie to themselves.
The design of your blog or your package or your outfit is nothing but an affect designed to create the placebo effect. … It’s all storytelling, it’s all lies.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In fact, your marketplace insists on it.”
The role of the subconscious
Research is ongoing into the role of the subconscious mind in triggering both the placebo and ‘nocebo’ effect in humans, with considerable implications for health care if the research is borne out in practice. As we’ve seen elsewhere in this blog, it is quite routine, for example, for conventional medical providers to knowingly prescribe mock or ineffectual medications (such as antibiotics for viral conditions), given patient expectations and for that matter social norms. This has not been named as knowingly prescribing placebos, or knowingly invoking the placebo effect, but the research is mounting!
Find benefits in ritual behaviors
Traditional ritual behaviour related to healing and harmonising are often dismissed out of hand in these ‘enlightened’ times. However, as Dr William Morrow explains:
“A further look at this mechanism reveals the power of the truly mysterious healing that is delivered by the placebo effect. Old notion of placebo: some medical research wants to eliminate the placebo effect in order to prove the effectiveness of a new pharmaceutical. New notion of a positive and purposeful placebo: promoting healing practices, including the “technique” of how family medicine is administered. And, knowingly or unknowingly, the delivery of alternative medicine could be described as following a ritual, even when the so-called science is not mainline.”
More on placebos and depression
From Mary Nichols, Design & Trend
Sugar pills can lower depression in people, writes Nature World News.
A new study suggests that people who believe that medication will help them to fight depression are those more likely to respond to placebo or fake treatments – compared with those who are skeptical about pharmaceutical interventions.
The study, by researchers at the University of California, found that the ‘power of pill’ is real for some depression patients.
‘In short, if you think a pill is going to work, it probably will,’ Andrew Leuchter, the study’s first author and a professor of psychiatry at the UCLA Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior, said in a statement.
The study included 88 people, who were aged between 18 and 65 years.
All participants had been diagnosed with depression and were given eight weeks of treatment.
Of the 88 patients, 29 received placebo treatment as well as supportive care, 20 were given supportive care alone and 39 were given genuine medication and supportive care.
The study is published in the British Journal of Psychiatry.
Harvard’s Kaptchuk at TEDMED 2014
From Stephanie Buam, at Medcity News:
“It would be oversimplified to call it the power of positive thinking, but Harvard Medical School Professor Ted Kaptchuk‘s talk at TEDMED 2014 in Washington D.C., highlighted compelling research surrounding the placebo effect. Kaptchuk focused on applications of the placebo effect for conditions as diverse as migraine headaches to Parkinson’s disease. It demonstrates that some of the power of a drug comes from a patient thinking that it will work.”
Measuring the Placebo Effect
It seems that as medicine finds it necessary to not only describe but measure the placebo effect, research projects like this one (into the activation of the placebo effect in Parkinson’s patients) are emerging. In this study, researchers “used their network mapping technique to identify specific brain circuits underlying the response to sham surgery in Parkinson’s disease patients participating in a gene therapy trial.”
Even when you KNOW you’re taking a placebo …
This research, from 2010, suggests patients benefit from the placebo effect even when told explicitly that they’re taking an ‘inert substance’