It has been known for decades that patients taking a dummy pill or receiving a fake treatment they believe is real can still show improvement of their symptoms. This placebo effect is strong enough that more than half of doctors admit to prescribing drugs strictly to capitalize on the patients' placebo reaction to taking a pill.
But this practice raises ethical questions, nor can doctors prescribe fake pills while telling a patient they are taking a real drug.
A new study shows that there may not be need for deception. In certain situations, doctors may be able to invoke the same benefits of placebos even if the patients know they are taking a pill with no active ingredients.
"There's a universal belief in medicine that placebos are only effective if you fool the patient into believing they are receiving the medicine," said Ted Kaptchuk at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School in Boston. "We decided to test if this is true. Do you really have to lie to get a placebo effect?"
The study involved 80 volunteers with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), half of whom were assigned to receive no treatment while the other half received placebo pills.
The pills were presented as "placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes." (This description was true.)
The patients were also told that the placebo effect is powerful; that the body can become conditioned to respond to placebo pills like Pavlov's dogs were conditioned to salivate at the sound of a bell; that a positive attitude helps but is not necessary; and that taking the pills faithfully is crucial.
"We built up expectations in the sense that we explained that the placebo effects are real, they happen automatically and you don’t have to believe in them," Kaptchuk said. "We also tried to suspend the patients' disbelief."
Read more at Discovery News
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