The Power Of The Placebo Effect In 1955, H. K. Beecher, the chief of anesthesiology at Mas-sachusetts General Hospital in Boston, published a landmark paper entitled “The Powerful Placebo.”1 In it, Beecher described his review of more than two dozen medical case histories and his findings, documenting that up to one-third of the patients healed from essentially nothing. The term used to describe this phenomenon was the placebo response—or, as it is more commonly known, the placebo effect. Placebo is used to describe any form of treatment where patients are led to believe that they’re experiencing a beneficial procedure or receiving a curative agent, while in reality they’re given something that has no known healing properties. The placebo can be as simple as a sugar pill or common saline solution or as complex as an actual surgery during which nothing is done. In other words, while the patients have agreed to participate in a medical study, they may not know precisely what their role in it will be. To test the placebo effect, they may undergo all of the experiences of surgery—including anesthesia, incisions, and sutures—while in reality nothing is added, taken away, or changed. No organs are treated. No tumors are removed. What’s important here is that the patients believe something is done. Based on their trust of the doctor and modern medicine, they believe that what they’ve experienced will help their condition. In the presence of their belief, their body responds as if they’d actually taken the drug or undergone a real procedure. While Beecher reported that around one-third of the patients he reviewed responded positively to a placebo, other studies have placed the response rate even higher, depending on...Read my full blog here: bit.ly/1umoBvS
Posted on: Wed, 21 Jan 2015 19:44:33 +0000
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