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The Placebo Effect H. K. Beecher originated the idea of placebo into the world today. Fake surgery and psychotherapy, sugar pills and even start pills are considered placebos.
Feeling improvement in health without treatment is described as the placebo effect. In some mysterious way, many people believe that the effect is due to the placebo itself. Latin for I shall please, a placebo is a treatment that is delivered by an administrator in the form of medication or special treatment. Placebos are sometimes given to patients by researchers and medical doctors. The placebo effect gains evidence this way. To some, the placebo effect is completely psychological.
They believe this because they believe in the treatment or feeling of improvement. A persons beliefs and hopes about a treatment, combined with their suggestibility, may have a significant biochemical effect (Carroll, 2005). The placebo effect, however, maybe be mind over behavior and not mind over matter. The feeling of sickness is a learned behavior. Pain is the same way, it is a learned behavior. Ill and hurt people perform a certain amount of role-playing.
They are not faking their illness or injury in any way, they are just acting as a sick or injured person would act in the social world. Because of this role playing, a change in attitude, feelings, and personality become different. The most commonly believed explanation is the psychological one. People are often confused when it is revealed to them that they are taking a placebo. They begin to think that their problem is not real, but actually a mental problem. Although, there are many studies that find actual improvements to say that the placebo effect is entirely psychological.
In many circumstances, placebos were used unintentionally and results were recorded the same way. This is known because the use of placebos has been reported in almost every research situation. As in situations where saline solution (simple salt water) injections stop the pain in patients who believe they are receiving a potent pain killer. Simple salt and water have no analgesic or anesthetic qualities, yet the subjects' minds responded and controlled the pain just as if they had received a narcotic or other potent pain killer (Henderson, 2005).
In one study, warts were magically removed when doctors painted colored dye on them and promised the patients that the warts would be gone when the color was gone. In a study of asthmatics, researchers found that they could produce dilation of the airways by simply telling people they were inhaling a bronchodilator, even when they weren't. Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on. Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscopy (Talbot, 2000). These effects are unlikely completely psychological. But, sometimes, it is not the case that the effectiveness of the placebo is true in each case.
Because illnesses and injuries take a natural course, some believe that the placebo effect is just the natural course. Spontaneous healing is common if no treatment is taken for an illness or injury. There have been so many improvements and healing that not all of the placebo effect cases can be explained by this. When people are given placebos and others are not, the people that received the placebos often do much better than the people given no treatment. A lot of attention and care to a subject that may trigger healing within the body by encouragement and hopefulness is another theory. According to Dr.
Walter A. Brown, a psychiatrist at Brown University, There is certainly data that suggest that just being in the healing situation accomplishes something. Depressed patients who are merely put on a waiting list for treatment do not do as well as those given placebos. And -- this is very telling, I think -- when placebos are given for pain management, the course of pain relief follows what you would get with an active drug. The peak relief comes about an hour after it's administered, as it does with the real drug, and so on. If placebo analgesia was the equivalent of giving nothing, you'd expect a more random pattern (Carroll, 2005).
Some believe that the placebo effect cannot cause physical changes. They believe that the only reason for improvement is because of positive physical environments around a patient. Often during these clinical trials, placebos have a positive or negative clinical effect on subjects tested (Placebo, 2005). But after nearly 50 years of acceptance, the placebo effect is now being questioned. In a recent paper in the New England Journal of Medicine, Dr. Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Dr.
Peter C. Gotzsche of the University of Copenhagen and Nordic Cochran Center reported the results of their recent study. They reviewed journal articles looking for the original research stating that 35 -percent of patients improve if given a placebo. All the papers they looked at did not include original research on the placebo effect but cited a reference. When they looked up the paper being referenced, it cited another reference. It turns out that the original source of the statement was a 1955 article The Powerful Placebo published in The Journal of the American Medical Association.
The paper was written by Henry Beecher, who had been chief of anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. Dr. Beecher had analyzed about a dozen studies and came up with the 35 -percent figure (Desonie, 2004). A particular model developed by Claridge shows another example of figuring out the placebo effect. He suggested the concept of the 'total drug effect' whereby the overall effect of a drug on an individual usually depends on a number of different factors in addition to its pharmacological action. These are the attributes of: the drug itself, the prescriber, the recipient, and the setting or physical environment in which prescribing or ingestion takes place (Peters, 2001).
This would explain why alternative therapies are effective. It would help explain why conventional procedures work. Administrators of the placebo must be careful of addictive patients who may eventually become dependent on the practice. Patients can be led to believe that diseases are only amenable to a specific type of treatment from a specific practitioner (Hart, 1999). Whether psychological, care and attention, or spontaneous healing, the true effect of the placebo cannot be known completely. There is no doubt that the placebo effect is powerful.
According to Danish researchers Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Peter C. Gotzsche, Little evidence in general that placebos had powerful clinical effects and compared with no treatment, placebo had no significant effect on binary outcomes, regardless of whether these outcomes were subjective or objective. For the trials with continuous outcomes, placebo had a beneficial effect, but the effect decreased with increasing sample size, indicating a possible bias related to the effects of small trials (Hrobjartsson, Asbojrn and Peter C. Gotzsche, 2001). Works Cited Carroll, R. (2005). Placebo effect.
Retrieved Nov. 09, 2005, from Placebo Effect Web site: web Desonie, D. (2004). Retrieved Nov. 09, 2005, from The Placebo Effect: Real or Imagined? Web site: web Hart, C. (1999). The mysterious placebo effect. Modern Drug Discovery Henderson, C. (2005). Placebo effects prove the value of suggestion.
Retrieved Nov. 09, 2005, from Placebo Effects Prove the Value of Suggestion Web site: web Hrobjartsson, Asbojrn and Peter C. Gotzsche. (2001). Is the placebo powerless? an analysis of clinical trials comparing placebo with no treatment.
The New England Journal of Medicine, 344 (21). Peters, D. (2001). Understanding the placebo effect in complementary medicine. Edinburgh: Churchill Livingstone. Placebo. (2005). Retrieved Nov. 09, 2005, from Placebo Web site: web Talbot, M. (2000).
The placebo prescription. New York Times Magazine
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