Tag Archives: Placebo Effect

Is acupuncture a placebo?

In a report published in the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Journals Library, the researchers showed that there is significant evidence to demonstrate that acupuncture provides more than a placebo effect.

Professor of Acupuncture Research, Hugh MacPherson, working with a team of scientists from the UK and US, brought together the results of 29 high quality clinical trials focused on patients treated with acupuncture and standard medical care.

In the majority of these trials, patients with chronic pain treated with acupuncture and standard medical care were tested against those who were provided with standard medical care alone, such as anti-inflammatory drugs and physiotherapy. The trials involved approximately 18,000 patients diagnosed with chronic pain of the neck, lower back, head, and knee.

The report shows that the addition of acupuncture compared to standard medical care alone significantly reduced the number of headaches and migraine attacks and reduced the severity of neck and lower back pain. It also showed that acupuncture reduced the pain and disability of osteoarthritis, which led to patients being less reliant on anti-inflammatory tablets to control pain.

Read the full article here.

‘Psychological Interventions’

A recent meta-study in the World Journal of Gastroenterology (March 28 2017) – Systematic review: The placebo effect of psychological interventions in the treatment of irritable bowel syndrome

Aim – “To determine the placebo response rate associated with different types of placebo interventions used in psychological intervention studies for irritable bowel syndrome.” (Six studies, with a total of 555 patients met the inclusion criteria.)

… and the placebo effect, unsurprisingly, figures significantly:

“Contrary to our expectations, the PRR (Placebo Response Rate) in studies on psychological interventions was comparable to that in studies on pharmacological, dietary and alternative medical interventions.”

Download the whole study in PDF here.

Placebo response and “Mindsets”

The research effort on the placebo effect deepens and widens.

“In a report published online Feb. 15 in The BMJ, researchers at Stanford call for more health care providers to place emphasis on the importance of individual mindsets and social context in healing … (and) to develop more studies that measure the physical effects of these psychosocial elements to understand and quantify patients’ subjective experiences of expectations, connection and trust.”

“We have long been mystified by the placebo effect,” Crum said. “But the placebo effect isn’t some mysterious response to a sugar pill. It is the robust and measurable effect of three components: the body’s natural ability to heal, the patient mindset and the social context. When we start to see the placebo effect for what it really is, we can stop discounting it as medically superfluous and can work to deliberately harness its underlying components to improve health care.”

Read the article here.

Suggestible You

In his book, ‘Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal’ author Erik Vance explores placebos, hypnosis, and how beliefs influence bodily responses to pain.

“Placebos and beliefs generally is so much a part of our lives,” he tells Kishore Hari on a recent episode of the Inquiring Minds podcast. “It has an amazing power to change our bodies.”

Read the article here, or listen to the Podcast!

 

Branding Research Shows Placebo Effect on Consumers

“I was just amazed that you could change what price you were going to launch a product at, and you could change what brand it was, and people would have dramatically different impressions of that product. And they would tell you incredibly different things about the product: they thought it was made of different materials, they thought it weighed more or it weighed less. Really out-there stuff that, at the time, we joked about but we couldn’t explain.”

More here. And meanwhile, for your listening pleasure …

 

When you know you’re taking a placebo …

This question/comment/assumption comes up a lot when we talk to people about placebos and the placebo effect. ‘It works’ (is the assumption) ‘if people believe it’s something else’ …

Like the ‘real’ thing, perhaps …? We’ve posted on this before, and it seems the research is becoming more robust and rigorous.

Once more, courtesy of Professor Kaptchuk … read Knowingly Taking a Placebo Still Reduces Pain, Studies Find …

Placebo Effect Works for Heart Procedures, Too

New research has shown that patient’s envisioning and expecting positive results from major surgery, including open heart surgery, will over time actually recover and heal more effectively.

“Optimizing patients’ expectations pre-surgery helps to improve outcome 6 months after treatment. This implies that making use of placebo mechanisms has the potential to improve long-term outcome of highly invasive medical interventions”

On Placebos and Depression Drugs

We note an interesting ‘counter narrative’ emerging – that is, scepticism about the commonly held view that drug treatments designed for mood disorders such as depression often engage the Placebo Effect. In this counter-narrative,

“Drug trials don’t show much in the way of classic placebo effects. The rise in placebo responses over the years is more likely due to the supportive factors in drug trials…and increasing problems with enrollment.”

The new finding—no upward trend in placebo responses—is unexpected and certain to be contested. Meanwhile, it stands as a rebuke to a popular narrative. By that account, drug effects had been hyped, expectations soared, and the inflated hopes were reflected in rising placebo response rates.”

This is fine, except the counter-narrative also resonates with challenges about the efficacy of conventional ‘gold-standard’ ‘blind’ ‘placebo controlled’ drug trials, where it has been shown that trials funded by drug companies (who by definition have a vested interest in their outcome) are 30% more likely to return ‘favourable’ results than trials which are not funded in this way. The ‘placebo effect’ might be the design and execution of the trial itself, not the actual function and efficacy of the placebo …!

Read the whole article here.

The Guardian Weighs in on the Placebo effect

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An excellent article in The Guardian on the placebo effect.

‘There is now evidence showing some people, known as “placebo responders”, do feel or get better after unwittingly, or even wittingly, taking a placebo – and it’s not just psychosomatic. Several studies are pointing to a biological basis for the placebo effect, with the latest research focused on a region of the brain known as the mid-frontal gyrus, which runs along the frontal lobes just above the eyes.’