Many people take glucosamine and chondroitin supplements for arthritis pain, but a controlled trial has found no evidence that the combination works. In fact, in this study, the placebo worked better.
Spanish researchers randomized 164 men and women with knee osteoarthritis to take a single daily dose of 1,500 milligrams of glucosamine and 1,200 of chondroitin, or an identical looking placebo. The study is in Arthritis & Rheumatology.
Read the full article here.
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”
Placebo treatments seem to have an effect on pets … but is the effect on the pets themselves, or ‘second hand’ through a placebo effect on pet owners? Find out here.
“The study included about 300 kids aged 8 to 17, enrolled at 31 centers. They had 11 migraines on average in the month before the study began and were randomly assigned to take either of the drugs or placebo pills daily for six months. Migraine frequency in the study’s last month was compared with what kids experienced before the study. At least half of kids in each group achieved the study goal, reducing migraine frequency by half.”
The same report, with a couple of videos, is over at CBS.
Quite a buzz lately about the placebo effect and back pain, extending from a randomized control trial in Portugal.
“Our findings demonstrate the placebo effect can be elicited without deception. Patients were interested in what would happen and enjoyed this novel approach to their pain. They felt empowered.” – Lead author Claudia Carvalho, Ph.D., ISPA
“It’s the benefit of being immersed in treatment: interacting with a physician or nurse, taking pills, all the rituals and symbols of our healthcare system,” (says placebo researcher Ted Kaptchuk, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School). “The body responds to that.”
While this study focused on chronic pain, Kaptchuk says it is possible that patients with other conditions that involve self-observation – such as fatigue, depression, or digestive problems – may benefit from open-label placebo treatment.
“You’re never going to shrink a tumor or unclog an artery with placebo intervention,” notes Kaptchuk. “It’s not a cure-all, but it makes people feel better, for sure. Our lab is saying you can’t throw the placebo into the trash can. It has clinical meaning, it’s statically significant, and it relieves patients. It’s essential to what medicine means.”
In Why Placebos Really Work: The Latest Science the Wall Street Journal points to the increasing frequency of ‘serious’ science envisioning health interventions that consciously include placebos and invoke the placebo effect. It seems the mind-body divide is something of an illusion!
Nevertheless, even though at least 50% of doctors actively prescribe placebos – often active drugs in such low doses that there is no apparent therapeutic benefit, or vitamins, antibiotics or over-the-counter analgesics like aspirin – they are still disinclined to prescribe a sugar pill. I guess they feel like it’s cheating, somehow.
Well-timed placebos may be useful in managing type 2 diabetes.
It seems that time, like everything else, has a subjective level – that is, one’s perception of time can actually manifest in the body. How does that work? Check this out …
… and have helped people with migraines, IBS and Parkinson’s.
Placebos have been shown to work for migraines, toothache and IBS
Parkinson’s patients continued to get relief after switching to placebos
After drugs, body becomes pre-conditioned to expect treatment and reacts
50% of American doctors found to prescribe placebos instead of drugs
New studies in the Boston suggest that placebos may causes changes in the body as well as the mind. Even with patients knowing they are being given a non-medicinal drug substitute they have still reported reduced pain and other symptoms in everyday, debilitating conditions such as irritable bowel syndrome or migraines.
So you want to run faster — but you’re not ready for steroids?
No problem: just swallow a pill made of sugar and water that you think is a steroid — and you’ll run faster, because you believe you can.
A recent Scottish study found runners told they were getting performance-enhancing pills felt stronger and ran faster than normally — even though the pills were fake.
It’s just the latest example of the Placebo Effect, one of the most powerful effects known to humans, along with the Greenhouse Effect, the Brexit Effect and the Trump Defect.
Placebos are fake drugs you think are real — and a third of the time, they’re more effective than most drugs in the pharmacy at reducing everything from headaches, pain, nausea, coughs and colds to anxiety caused by fear that the pills your doctor gave you are actually placebos.
Read the full article here.
Stage direction, scripting, and more convincing theatrics could help doctors deliver the full benefits of the placebo effect to their patients, a study suggests.