The Placebo effect
Posted on March 17, 2021 • 4 minutes • 731 words
Be it a Psychologist, Neurobiologist, yoga master, or spiritual seeker; One of the most sought questions is the power of the Mind to influence the body. A rational being might not admit the strength of thought to change the course of a physical process. But strangely, every chemist discovering a new drug needs to combat this reality.
Let me narrate to you a curious encounter by your explorer. A patient told a general physician about his sleeplessness and asked the doctor for the pill he has given a week back. The doctor smiled, pulled out his drawer, and gave him two large pills. This became curious because the pills looked too big for a normal sleeping pill. Your curious explorer asked the doctor about the pills, to find out that those were nothing but Sugar pills. These sugar pills are responsible for a good night sleep for many in that locality.
This might lead to a question of morality. Should a doctor treat or fool his patients? What if I told you that fooling is also a treatment? Let me give you a different perspective on this story. Let us explore the placebo effect.
From time immemorial, the ritual of doing something is often associated with some other meaning. Humans have conditioned themselves in ways unimaginable. Going to holy places fills peace in your heart; catching your pillow makes you feel good; taking a pill is also associated with a positive healing effect. In 1799, John Haygarth has given the first scientific demonstration on how he was able to relieve the pain of rheumatic patients using a sham wooden quack remedy. Scientists soon found out this phenomenon of placebo effect where the very act of taking a pill or undergoing a complex procedure started curing the patient irrespective of what the pill had, or whether the surgery was a sham. Ever since there were innumerable questions on how placebos work. And many of the questions still remain unanswered.
##How different are the drugs compared to placebo?
The gold standard to call a chemical molecule a drug is that it has to pass through something called a “randomized, double-blinded, placebo-controlled clinical trial”. In simple words, from the two patient groups, one group is given a prospective drug molecule, and another is given a placebo. On average, if the chemical compound shows better results than the placebo, it is called a drug.
##Are placebos weak?
One can logically state that placebos work better than not taking anything, and are not as efficacious as a drug molecule. But one must also consider that the statistical results measure the efficacy of an average population. There could be countless scenarios where a placebo works better than taking a drug. Medical literature has recorded cases where the placebo group did much better than the group which took Hydroxychloroquine for preventing SARS CoV2 disease progression. Now science has found that under the right circumstances, a placebo can be just as effective as traditional treatments.
##How do placebos work?
We must go back to the question of whether the doctor was actually fooling the patients. It turns out that if I take the same sugar pill even after knowing that it is not a sleeping pill, I might still drift into sleep. The doctor just increased the chances of this happening by not revealing the treatment procedure. Scientists started to realize that placebos are more than just positive thinking. The act of taking a pill itself can work miracles. More than half of the migraine patients who knowingly took a placebo reported a significant decrease in their pain. If you are a person who opposes taking chemicals into your body, just take a sugar pill. It might still do you the same good.
##The four groups
If we look at this from a broader perspective, we have four different groups who want to come out of pain. And for an average population, the probability of the first group getting rid of the pain is much lower, and the chances of success increase with every group.
-The first group does no action.
-The second group acts on it without a positive hope.
-The third group acts on it with positive hope, but the recipe of the act is not appropriate for the expected results.
-The last group has the right action component and positive hope.
Which group are you in?