Take A Placebo and Call Me in the Morning

It’s no secret that we have all had our notion of reality tested beyond reason, since June 16, 2015, when Donald Trump left the world of professional wrestling and reality show hosting in order to run for President of the United States. Since then, we have been told that what we saw we didn’t, what we didn’t see we did, what we read or watched was fake, that science was a mere suggestion, and that our friends were our enemies and our enemies were our friends.  We’ve been living in a fun house, without the actual fun.

Now, we learn that placebos, simple sugar pills used in control groups to determine the efficacy of real medication, are actually more effective than the real medication they are testing.  The theory is real: Take two groups of people. Give one group a placebo, the other medication. Nobody knows which pills they are getting. Then test the results.

A sentient humanoid would assume that testing would result in the medicated group to have positive results and the placebo group to not. yet, for many years researchers have been surprised that placebos also manage pain and take away other noxious symptoms people have.  (A note here: Life in the Boomer Lane can sort of relate. She, also, has experienced relief from various ailments, with a simple dose of sugar.)

Now, in a recent development, researchers have found that, not only are placebos effective, they can be more effective than medication.  According to Vox, “Harvard medicine professor Ted Kaptchuk is at the bleeding edge (no pun intended) of a radical new treatment in medicine: giving patients pills that don’t work.

“’Our patients tell us it’s nuts,” he says. “The doctors think it’s nuts. And we just do it. And we’ve been getting good results.’”

Kaptchuk not only gives his subjects the placebos, he tells them they are getting placebos. In spite of knowing they are getting sugar and not meds, they improve.

Overall, he’s trying to show how the “intangibles” of medicine “actually change how people experience illnesses,” he says.  “The placebo effect is a surrogate marker for everything that surrounds a pill.” And that includes rituals, symbols, doctor-patient encounters. … It’s basically the water that medicine swims in.”

And, the placebo effect can also accompany real drugs. “Morphine given without a person knowing — surreptitiously, in a IV drip — is 50 percent less effective than when it is given in front of them. That’s the placebo effect.”