What does the term "placebo effect" mean to you?

[Octarine]

What do you guys think the term "placebo effect" means and what do you think the results of a "placebo" arm of a placebo controlled trial actually reflects?

Now before answering, I'd like to suggest: don't look it up on Google, Wikipedia, a dictionary or elsewhere.

What I am interested is your current understanding of the term.

If you need some prompting, then you can answer the following:














Do you believe that placebo effects are bio-psycho-social? In the sense that conditioned beliefs about medicine can have real biochemical effects on symptoms other than anxiety, depression and mild pain. Which symptoms?

 

[nolla]

I read somewhere that you don't have to work out, you just have to believe that the muscles will grow and they will. Now, that's placebo!

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

What do you guys think the term "placebo effect" means and what do you think the results of a "placebo" arm of a placebo controlled trial actually reflects?

The placebo effect is a physiological phenomenon that is caused by self-affirmative bias.

If you are talking about placebos being used in blind experiments, etc., they are simply controls used to help eliminate some amount of bias or statistical incorrectness, so that the experimenter may see how well his/her drug actually works, etc.

Do you think it includes the the (false) attribution of any changes in symptoms to the (placebo) treatment? Or any psycho-social conditioning (ie. stating before hand, this treatment will work if your pain is real).

What?

Don't know if you've seen: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nocebo?wasRedirected=true

 

[Arthur Schopenhauer]

I hope I'm right about this stuff...

 

[Octarine]

The placebo effect is a physiological phenomenon that is caused by self-affirmative bias.

Can you explain what you mean by self-affirmative bias and how it arises?

BTW, this is not about being 'right', but seeing what people commonly believe the terms to mean.

 

[Such Irony]

The Placebo effect is what happens when you listen to the band Placebo:

[YOUTUBE="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbHkwrGgsoA"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KbHkwrGgsoA[/YOUTUBE]

 

[gromit]

Placebo effect is when we expect something to impact us so it does, e.g. we feel better after ingesting a pill made from something like cornstarch if we believe it contains medicine.

 

[Athenian200]

The placebo effect refers to a situation in which a known ineffective treatment (to the doctor, but not the patient) seems to improve health more than no treatment at all, due to the person's belief that it will have an effect.

A good example of the placebo effect can be seen by watching the episode of the Andy Griffith Show, "Ellie comes to town," in which the new pharmacist refuses to give a patient her pills without a prescription, and she then falls ill and becomes bedridden as a result. This makes everyone think that she's cruel for sticking to the rules. Later, she finds out that the pills the previous pharmacist was giving this patient, were actually sugar pills that had no effect, which was why they were given without a prescription. She gives the patient her pills, and almost instantly she gets "better," and rises from bed.

The patient herself could be considered something of a hypochondriac, but that's another word.

 

[Retmeishka]

To me, the 'placebo effect' is a way of telling patients that they cannot possibly make their own observations about their illness. Whatever you observe on your own, it can't possibly be true unless a double-blind, placebo-controlled, government-sponsored experiment has proven it. It means, you can't trust your own senses (but the scientists doing the experiments can trust theirs, though). The placebo effect is a way of dismissing everything that mainstream medicine, government-approved medicine, doesn't approve of. If the drug companies want to sell drugs for attention-deficit children, then they will say that it's the 'placebo effect' when parents use the Feingold Diet (natural diet, no artificial colors, etc) and notice that their children's behavior drastically improves. That's just one example.... Don't get me started, I've wanted to talk about the placebo effect for a long time. I'll have to save this topic for later.

 

[wolfy]

The placebo effect refers to the effect of a placebo.

What is a placebo you might be thinking... a good question. A placebo is typically a sugar pill (a pill made of sugar) that is given instead of a real chemically active pill...

The placebo effect is the effect that has on the individual.

 

[phoenix13]

The placebo effect is the measurable manifestation of one's expectations about a medical intervention. It doesn't have to be a mere psychological thing either. For example, with a placebo pain killer, there may be top-down modulation of pain receptors in the individual as a result of their expectations, similar to the mechanism of action of a non-placebo pain killer (I think this is why many doctors, before giving you a shot, say "this won't hurt a bit" to try to alter our expectations and make it actually hurt less). I've also heard of negative placebo effects, where the patient thinks the medication will make them vomit, and they end up vomiting a sugar pill.

 

[The_Liquid_Laser]

My understanding is the placebo effect is the psychosomatic component of medicine. In other words part of the curing power of medicine comes from believing that the medicine will cure you.

For example say a study was done on patients inflicted with some disease that penicillin will treat. Group A is given a shot of penicillin. Group B is given a shot of ordinary saline solution. Group C is given nothing.

The results will be that group A will see the most improvement in conditions. Group B will see the second most improvement and group C will see the least improvement. The impotent saline solution actually has something of a curing effect simply because the patients believe it will. That is the placebo effect.