The Placebo Effect: A moving target

If you were complaining of an intense pain in your stomach and I offered you an injection of morphine, do you think you would feel better? What if after the injection, you started to feel better and I then told you the syringe was actually filled with saline (salt-water) solution? You felt genuinely better, even though the treatment I gave you was essentially false. This is the essential idea behind the placebo effect. You perceive that you've been treated and the strength of that assumption actually causes your brain to produce dopamine and opioids which relieve your symptoms. Granted, this works best on problems with a psychological basis (i.e., pain or depression, but not cancer tumors). And interestingly, capsule pills work better than the normal type (with injections have an even larger effect). This is because the varied expectations of efficacy for each of these treatments.

But what you might not know about the placebo effect is actually growing! That's right, according to recent reports people are more affected by the placebo effect than we have been in the past. In fact researcher Arthur Barsky recently published a study that found anti-depressant placebos were about twice as powerful in 2005 than in 1980. That's a staggering increase in an effect that many doctors have assumed to be stable.

So why might the placebo effect be growing in strength? The truth is we're not really sure. It might be that people have more faith in the efficacy of the treatments we're given. We're very much in the habit of feeling ill, going to the doctor for a prescription, and then feeling better. This routine is very engrained in our culture. There could also be other explanations, but only now are we beginning to explore the causes and its potential beneficial use in therapies. 

While this might all seem like good new for potential new therapies using the placebo effect, it's not all good news. pharmaceutical companies are required to prove their drugs are stronger than the placebo effect in at least 2 trials. But as the placebo effect gets stronger, it's harder to make medications that can actually beat it. Some companies are getting out of the psychopharmacological business altogether in oder to cut their losses. This could result in fewer new treatments coming out for psychological disorders. We don't yet know how much this will impact the future of treatment, but it's definitely something to keep an eye on in the future.

Oh and because I'm obsessed with sleep research, here's an article about how the placebo effect can even be used for increasing cognitive performance by making you believe you received better quality sleep than in actuality.