More likely differences between different questions /studies (including for example contraceptive pills (1/4 of wich are placebos but stabilise the rhythm of consuming them)).
That is what I was thinking. If the patients are receiving placebo or even told it is a placebo, do they still cost hundreds of dollars? That would be the most unethical part, in my opinion.
There's a big difference between telling someone: "Here's a pill. It's a placebo, but placebos work even if people know it's a placebo. Let us know how it goes for you." ...vs... "Here's a pill. It's a placebo, but placebos only work if people don't know it's a placebo. Let us know how it goes for you."
My first thought. I wonder if the results would be the same if subjects made the placebos themselves by filling empty capsules with sugar or using a pill press or something.
I have a similar thing where some of my medication (all of which is for mental health) would work instantly after taking it even if its a new pill or I didnt have them for a few days. I would just take them and have a feeling throughout my body and my behavior would suddenly change. I know that it shouldn't be working this fast but it still does.
Not really. Homeopaty claims to work because its "contains" some extremely diluted ingredients. Of course they are so diluted that they are non-existent, but homeopaths don't say that.
Did the studies examine if the participants understood what "Placebo" is? What about the Hawthorn effect which is improvement from knowing you're in a study?
I mean... my headaches sometimes feel better immediately after taking medication that I KNOW takes time to start working. I guess just telling your subconscious mind "There, I DID something about it! Medicine achieved! Things will be better any minute now; please stop bothering me!" can sometimes make you feel better.
When I couldn't fall asleep or I was having insomnia, I used to imagine I have a pill that helps me relax and sleep and slowly melts in my mouth. Worked every time.
Is it just me or does his diction and tone really call Levar Burton to mind? Anyway, it's lovely, I could listen to this guy tell me about science all day.
Wait a minute, why use *green* strawberry milk? Was it to make sure it didn't mess with them if they drank regular strawberry milk and started associating that with immune suppression?
My guess is, since the study subjects received (if I understood correctly) either one dose of cyclosporine A and later one dose of placebo, or two doses of placebo, regular strawberry milk might not be a strong enough conditioning stimulus to work in just two exposures. Or perhaps it wouldn't work if the subjects were used to drinking regular strawberry milk and thus already had different associations with it, which could mess up the results. Hence it was coloured green and scented with lavender oil.
@@Zheeraffa1 That was my thought as well. You want to go with something unique enough that you avoid previous associations and isn't likely to be had unintentionally during the trial either, but still otherwise appetizing.
I always find placebos fascinating. Oh, the power of the brain! There's even a school of thought that it's not about the pill - the ritual of seeing a doctor who seems confident treatment will help is itself a placebo.
That is great news! I clicked the button. Now it says "unsubscribed." Nobody has fed me a thing yet but I eagerly await the arrival of my food. Thanks!
Ever since Anthony started hosting, it's been bugging me that something about his speech pattern is familiar and I haven't been able to figure it out until now. If you told me that he was the new host of a new Reading Rainbow I would totally believe you. He sounds like he could be Levar Burton's son. ♥️
I have experienced this subjectively, so it's nice to know that there's actual evidence now to back it up. About as long as I've known the placebo effect was a thing, I've come up with dumb-but-harmless rituals to deal with all manner of maladies, trusting that my belief in the power of the placebo effect will invoke the placebo effect. Which sounds weird writing it down, but hey, it's worked for me for my entire adult life.
“Anywhere from 17 to 97% of Doctors say they’ve done this at least once” Can I get a little bit of clarification on that statistic? 17 to 97 is a huge jump lmfao
I suspect that some, if not all, of this "placebos work even when the patients are told they're placebos" is simply because of the same reason "alternative medicine" works-the medical practitioner is at least _pretending_ to take the patient's complaint seriously, instead of going "no, that's not a problem, go away" or "well, yes, that's a problem, but there's nothing we can do for it anyway, go away". As an example: "sham" acupuncture, where the needles are placed randomly, is just as effective as "traditional" acupuncture. In spite of the description I'm not convinced study participants really, fully understood exactly what a "placebo" is. Too bad you most likely can't do a study where you give patients a _nocebo_ instead, to see if they get worse when they're given something they're told will _worsen_ their condition-and yes, I fully understand the ethical problems behind this idea.
Reminds me of a Dilbert episode where Dogbert gives Dilbert a bottle labelled Placebo and Dilbert questions it but takes it anyway and he still felt better.
Very interesting how you can twist the explanation around placebo so that, while being straight forward with the patient, the positive effect still remains! I always found the placebo effect quite curious
So if a placebo causes your body in a previously conditioned way wouldn't this also mean that the side effects will be the same as the actual medication as well. If I condition my body that taking the blue pill causes my blood pressure to drop but that it also makes me nauseated, wouldn't that continue on the placebo?
At the school my Mom worked at as a secretary years ago. They were legally allowed to give the kids a dose of Pando syrup for headaches and fever. The kids would come to her often saying they had a headache. But like many of the teachers, she suspected a lot came to try get out of school. So what she used to do is, she had an empty Pando bottle and filled it with Soda Stream lemonade concentrate. It tasted exactly the same as the medicine. She would give them that. Most never came back. If they did then she gave them the actual medicine.
Wait.... But doesn't this call in to question any medications? Because if patients can get that result from known placebos, then what does that say about prescribed medicines?
They need the medicine initially in high doses. The drink causes their body to associate the curative effects of the medicine with it, then they lower the dosage of the med (patients are still taking it) BUT the body now thinks "hey, I take that drink and I get better" so you don't need *as much* medicine anymore. A lot of immune suppressing drugs have very bad side effects.
I've been doing this for years. None of the anxiety meds or dosages that I've tried have worked, but I kept taking them, hoping that I might get some benefit from the placebo effect (unfortunately it hasn't worked; I seem to be as immune to the placebo effect as the actual meds 😕).
If you've become conditioned to expect nothing to work, that could really harm the efficacy of the placebo. :( You'd need some cognitive behavioral therapy to break out of that, perhaps?
This is also why the last stages of pharmaceutical research aren't blinded, because in the real world people would also know what they're taking and even if much of the effect of a drug is placebo; if it works, it works. This is called external validity, where the goal is to define the real world effects of a drug as best as possible, rather than elucidating the exact ways in which it works and how precisely the drug affects certain biomarkers compared to placebo or established treatment under blinding (which is called internal validity)
What if they were just told it was a placebo but didnt fully believe it? I know if i were in a medical trial I would be very conscious of the fact I could be in the placebo group. Same suspicion could arise but flipped? Oh they told me it's a placebo but maybe it's actually real medicine?
Technically, everything that's supposed is necessarily supposable. So people who say "supposably" are correct--just less specific than those who say "supposedly." (By the way, it bugs me too, but pointing it out usually gets one nowhere.) :)
@@jeremydavis3631 by the way, it bugs me when people don't like my humour ;) ya, I've realized nothing I say matters...it's just for the lawls these days
Idk...I have taken actual medicine for depression and didn't get better...keep getting told by a friend I have to "choose" to get better(meaning she wants me to believe in basically a placebo), but if actual medication doesn't work, then me pretending isn't going to do anything either?
As mentioned (but not stressed clearly enough IMO) this applies to symptoms involving perception of pain, anxiety, irritation, and other hormonal responses to stimuli. It's not a _cure_ for disease or a method to heal things; it's basically a therapeutic treatment that works on symptoms but not causes. That has benefits, but it's easy to overstate or misunderstand the scope of utility and jump to (potentially dangerous) conclusions about taking placebos well outside of the applicability here.
Every time they do an episode on placebos apparently being the best thing ever, I just think that we're probably a good ten years before that's ALL that they'll give poor or marginalized people as far as medicine goes. Like, active medicine is going to become the domain of the rich and so if you're poor and have some kind of condition, they're just going to give you a placebo with the word "placebo" on the bottle and if you don't get better from that it's because you didn't BELIEVE hard enough in it and you'll be blamed for not trying hard enough to make your own brain do something. Also, the placebo effect might wear off when people start having or continue to have symptoms because they needed real medicine and quickly associate the word "placebo" with "doesn't do anything" and "I'm still going to be in pain/have symptoms".
Yes and no. Some home remedies will literally make you sicker because no amount of belief will mitigate the bad effects (e.g. smearing butter on sunburn makes it far worse but used to be the default home remedy 50 or 70 years ago, and trying to cure autism in your child by feeding them bleach will damage their insides, possibly irreparably, or even kill them) but drinking fridged lemon water despite having a healthy balanced diet normally (I.e. you aren't actually making a difference because you are just gonna pee out the vitamin c) might make you feel less stressed about the shitty situation and make you heal a bit faster because of that and the placebo effect.
I have degenerative Osteoarthritis in my spine and knees. I take morphine twice a day to deal with the crippling pain. It also leaves me exceptionally tired so I have to sleep during the day. If I could get over the tiredness with a placebo or even replace my morphine with one, I would. But as I'm scientifically minded I wouldn't expect a placebo to have any effect if I knew it was such.
Did they consider the possibility that the patients thought they were receiving a *real* drug marked placebo? I can only imagine some people think it's so ridiculous to be _told_ you'll be taking a placebo that they just assume they're being put up to opposite shenanigans
Honestly this video makes me wonder if my cure-all for when I get sick or start feeling super down (a nice hot bowl of pho, which is a Vietnamese noodle soup) is a placebo or if it just genuinely helps, and, more importantly, if it even matters.
I get this, though. There have definitely been times where I did something that I knew wouldn't really help, and yet I felt better for doing it. Haven't we all?
I'm quite worried about the adequate disclosure there. Saying something is a placebo or "like a sugar pill" doesn't adequately explain the treatment if the patient doesn't know what "placebo" means and/or doesn't know that "like a sugar pill" means it's ineffective. The very fact a physician gives it to the patient suggests it is a medical treatment with potential medical benefits. Now... maybe we're okay with physicians lying to patients with regards to placebos, and not receiving genuine informed consent. But there's ambiguity in (at least) the descriptions of these disclosures, and that's troublesome. If a physician said to me "I'm prescribing this placebo to you; sometimes the routine of taking a medically inert placebo tricks the brain into getting better," then I know what I'm in for. But if the physician says "I'm prescribing X to you; we've found that some people who take X get better, though the numbers are small - indeed, comparable to that of a placebo," then that's misleading.
You didn't mention that open label placebos are not as effective as normal placebos. Research needs to be done on what conditions make an effective placebo effect most likely.
Are you ok at home? Some people get stressed from being around family and then start associating home with bad things, then your body reacts (like how depression and anxiety can cause physical issues). It's called the nocebo effect, it's the opposite of placebo.
And that's why I don't understand the attack standard medicine rides against homeopathy, as long as that is limited to relatively mild and non-life-threatening ailments. In many cases the feeling of being taken care of is the major contributing factor in the improvement of the patient. So why forgo this powerful arrow in the quiver?
I wonder if one can self - medicate successfully with placebos. I wonder if making people take placebos while they are taking a handful of Rx's already would backfire.
That got me thinking. If I know that placebos can make me feel better nonetheless, when I take a sugar pill I'm thinking that the placebo effect WILL make me feel better... And this thought alone "activates" the placebo effect. Plus, all the "habits tricking the brain into thinking it's actual medication" stuff
Hm, so assuming I take pill A to reduce my blood pressure and after a few days my doctor finds out that there's actually something else wrong with me so he gives me pill B, which may be a placebo. Assuming also that I am a well behaved pavlonian dog, will my brain still reduce my blood pressure despite me having swapped pills...
Everyone reports that, but it was apparently not so. Can't seem to find the origin of the bell myth, though. Would be interesting to know where that started.
As strange as it may sound, perhaps saying, “this is like taking a sugar pill” or “this is a placebo” may not be getting the point across that they are medically inert? In the case of calling it a sugar pill, there’s a lot of popular press to the effect that sugar is a drug. In the case of calling it a placebo, there may be people who don’t know what the word “placebo” means.
This is why I want to start practicing placebo witchcraft. If you feel ill and someone gives you water to feel better. It may work. But if someone puts that same water in a potion bottle and applies food coloring in a witch costume. It's going to work WAYYYY better. The magic is the placebo effect and is further boosted by the aesthetic
The nastier and more uncomfortable the procedure also works. a small pill < big cumbersome pill < big rectal pill < nasty drink < injection but self-administered < injection by GP < injection/iv in hospital < small operation < big under aenesthesia operation (but they don't treat). All fun times.
bruh i medicate myself all the time. like just last night i took lsd and mdma and they i candyflipped but when i get a placebo from my guy my brain associates it with anger and fukin rage
is it not just the feeling someone cares, that makes us feel better? we have become so antisocial, we dont even see how much we need 'love' i just wont believe when my doctor gives me a mentos, that it will do anything besides strengthening our interpersonal bond...
Placebos are seriously underrated and demonized. If your body can trick itself into getting better, that's awesome! Of course it won't cure cancer or any other serious diseases, but it can definitely help cope.
This needs better research. The placebo effect is something that relates not to the act of taking the so called placebo pill, but to the statistical measure of effect that's observed (either positive or negative) which isn't related to the active compound being studied. That's why there's very little evidence on placebo "working" on conditions where the outcome isn't just a perception, a feeling or something self-reported (pain, happiness, relief, etc). Let's see those placebos dropping cholesterol levels, diminishing HIV serology or prolonging cancer overall survival
I can see the doctors and insurance now. He need this treatment... It's a very expensive cutting edge new technology, a $4000 sugar pill! They will do anything to bill the hell out of your insurance
brains are the worst ?? wow yeah why not .. after all a brain only contains more cells than the entire universe has stars, a brain operates faster than anything per second and it can consciously recognize reality .. it can solve problems while you're sleeping and dreaming .. it can distinguish between important memories and rubbish .. it can memorize the most complex date within a blink .. but yeah let's go with your assumption instead!
@@evilloooo I have a debilitating concoction of mental illness and constantly get reminded of things that I regret but yeah my perspective is entirely unreasonable.
I have another hypothesis. What if the person simply FORGETS that they're taking a placebo? I mean I know that I take my medicine every day without really thinking about what I am taking, just that it's something I need to take. So I can see a person whose been on medicine that works for a while and then switching to a placebo forgetting that it's a placebo...so you still get the placebo effect.
patients are told that placebos are effective, and so that makes the placebo effective even tho they know it is WHICH MEANS THE PLACEBO EFFECT CAN BE ITS OWN PLACEBO EFFECT *WHAT*
I'm sure it work work either way, as long as you want it to make you feel better, regardless of whether or not it's a placebo or not. What matters is that your brain makes you feel better when you take it. :) The brain is a powerful thing. You want to feel more pain? Just convince your brain you are in a lot of pain. You are tired of it and want less pain? Same thing, just convince the brain that you are not in a lot of pain.
Me: "ok here's a pill"
Monkey brain: "hee hoo medicine"
Me: "it's just a placebo, it has no physical effect"
Brain: "no! medicine makes health!"
Soul: tf is going on?
"17% to 97% of doctors..." What a margin of error!
More likely differences between different questions /studies (including for example contraceptive pills (1/4 of wich are placebos but stabilise the rhythm of consuming them)).
@@fionafiona1146 Still though, it would have been nice to receive an explanation for that weird statistic in the video as it does stand out.
@@omninulla9472
If it's not in the discription it's unusually sloppy but "Healthcare triage" goes to the other extreme and gets annoying.
Right? What went wrong there?
@@fionafiona1146 Really? I don't find healthcare triage annoying at all.
American healthcare will be like:
-Here's your placebo, sir. It's just sugar pills, really. And here's the bill for 48000$.
That is what I was thinking. If the patients are receiving placebo or even told it is a placebo, do they still cost hundreds of dollars? That would be the most unethical part, in my opinion.
XD
Charge $3.00?
Placebos can be just as expensive if not more than actual medicine sometimes
Plot twist: This video is a placebo. They don’t actually work if you know, but they will if you believe they still do.
“That’s what they WANT you to think...!!!”
Some tinfoil hat guy, probably
That's why the doctors have to explain the placebo effect beforehand.
That's not a plot twist. That's the plot
Plot twist plot twist: this comment is a placebo. He just wants you to be sick and miserable
There's a big difference between telling someone:
"Here's a pill. It's a placebo, but placebos work even if people know it's a placebo. Let us know how it goes for you."
...vs...
"Here's a pill. It's a placebo, but placebos only work if people don't know it's a placebo. Let us know how it goes for you."
"Well, my doctor said it's a placebo, but is it really?"
My first thought. I wonder if the results would be the same if subjects made the placebos themselves by filling empty capsules with sugar or using a pill press or something.
"What does that pharmacist know anyway, they took two hours to fill a tiny bottle"
@@doggfite yikes
I have a similar thing where some of my medication (all of which is for mental health) would work instantly after taking it even if its a new pill or I didnt have them for a few days. I would just take them and have a feeling throughout my body and my behavior would suddenly change. I know that it shouldn't be working this fast but it still does.
Open label placebos are existing for centuries: it's called homeopathy
Boiron Laboratories wants to : Know your location.
Exactly what I was going to comment :)
Homeopathy is pretty dangerous because some people try to take them instead of medication for serious diseases.
Not really. Homeopaty claims to work because its "contains" some extremely diluted ingredients. Of course they are so diluted that they are non-existent, but homeopaths don't say that.
@@b33thr33kay Which basically makes them placebo? E.g. something that doesn't have (scientifically) proven substance, but still works cause belief?
geez, the brain really has some strange quirks- it’s so cool that we can learn how to take advantage of them!!!
Did the studies examine if the participants understood what "Placebo" is? What about the Hawthorn effect which is improvement from knowing you're in a study?
I didn't know this effect existed. Interesting.
I mean... my headaches sometimes feel better immediately after taking medication that I KNOW takes time to start working. I guess just telling your subconscious mind "There, I DID something about it! Medicine achieved! Things will be better any minute now; please stop bothering me!" can sometimes make you feel better.
When I couldn't fall asleep or I was having insomnia, I used to imagine I have a pill that helps me relax and sleep and slowly melts in my mouth. Worked every time.
Is it just me or does his diction and tone really call Levar Burton to mind? Anyway, it's lovely, I could listen to this guy tell me about science all day.
Are you thinking specifically of the _Reading Rainbow_ era? Because I can see the similarities.
Wait a minute, why use *green* strawberry milk? Was it to make sure it didn't mess with them if they drank regular strawberry milk and started associating that with immune suppression?
My guess is, since the study subjects received (if I understood correctly) either one dose of cyclosporine A and later one dose of placebo, or two doses of placebo, regular strawberry milk might not be a strong enough conditioning stimulus to work in just two exposures. Or perhaps it wouldn't work if the subjects were used to drinking regular strawberry milk and thus already had different associations with it, which could mess up the results. Hence it was coloured green and scented with lavender oil.
@@Zheeraffa1 I read the study, you're correct.
@@Zheeraffa1 That was my thought as well. You want to go with something unique enough that you avoid previous associations and isn't likely to be had unintentionally during the trial either, but still otherwise appetizing.
I always find placebos fascinating. Oh, the power of the brain! There's even a school of thought that it's not about the pill - the ritual of seeing a doctor who seems confident treatment will help is itself a placebo.
Well.. I thought 'Placebo' was a specific brand of medicine until I was 15...
"recent study shows placebo better than placebo"
That is great news! I clicked the button. Now it says "unsubscribed." Nobody has fed me a thing yet but I eagerly await the arrival of my food. Thanks!
Ever since Anthony started hosting, it's been bugging me that something about his speech pattern is familiar and I haven't been able to figure it out until now. If you told me that he was the new host of a new Reading Rainbow I would totally believe you. He sounds like he could be Levar Burton's son. ♥️
I think you may be right, both on the similar pattern of speech, and that he'd make a suitable host for Reading Rainbow!
I have experienced this subjectively, so it's nice to know that there's actual evidence now to back it up. About as long as I've known the placebo effect was a thing, I've come up with dumb-but-harmless rituals to deal with all manner of maladies, trusting that my belief in the power of the placebo effect will invoke the placebo effect. Which sounds weird writing it down, but hey, it's worked for me for my entire adult life.
“Anywhere from 17 to 97% of Doctors say they’ve done this at least once” Can I get a little bit of clarification on that statistic? 17 to 97 is a huge jump lmfao
Someone at Boiron watching this : "Quick ! I need to take notes !"
Let's hope for them that they are not using a pen with homeopatic ink!
i like this guy, his talking never gets boring
I suspect that some, if not all, of this "placebos work even when the patients are told they're placebos" is simply because of the same reason "alternative medicine" works-the medical practitioner is at least _pretending_ to take the patient's complaint seriously, instead of going "no, that's not a problem, go away" or "well, yes, that's a problem, but there's nothing we can do for it anyway, go away". As an example: "sham" acupuncture, where the needles are placed randomly, is just as effective as "traditional" acupuncture. In spite of the description I'm not convinced study participants really, fully understood exactly what a "placebo" is. Too bad you most likely can't do a study where you give patients a _nocebo_ instead, to see if they get worse when they're given something they're told will _worsen_ their condition-and yes, I fully understand the ethical problems behind this idea.
Just wanna say you've been doing great as a host, homie! You speak very clearly for one thing.
Reminds me of a Dilbert episode where Dogbert gives Dilbert a bottle labelled Placebo and Dilbert questions it but takes it anyway and he still felt better.
This video is a placebo to test if placebos work as placebos if you know they're placebos
Don't get me wrong I love Hank, but the way the gentleman in this video speaks in such an assuring and calm manner is refreshing.
Very interesting how you can twist the explanation around placebo so that, while being straight forward with the patient, the positive effect still remains! I always found the placebo effect quite curious
Damn, I wish that was working on me; still waiting for my new medicine to kick in and I've been on it for 2 weeks.
So if a placebo causes your body in a previously conditioned way wouldn't this also mean that the side effects will be the same as the actual medication as well. If I condition my body that taking the blue pill causes my blood pressure to drop but that it also makes me nauseated, wouldn't that continue on the placebo?
Almost never experiance placebo as i always sit down and check " do i REALLY feel any difference?". Usally i dont
It depends on the person. Just like how some people are more easily hypnotized than others.
At the school my Mom worked at as a secretary years ago. They were legally allowed to give the kids a dose of Pando syrup for headaches and fever. The kids would come to her often saying they had a headache. But like many of the teachers, she suspected a lot came to try get out of school. So what she used to do is, she had an empty Pando bottle and filled it with Soda Stream lemonade concentrate. It tasted exactly the same as the medicine. She would give them that. Most never came back. If they did then she gave them the actual medicine.
I can see this being like fake cigarettes or other rituals.
Im amazed this doctor didnt get 50 college complaints in the process of doing this study
But Does the neural system can generate the neurotransmiters or biomolecules that they don´t synthezise?
5:32 _ I wonder if the placebos would need to be expensive in order to work.
Wait.... But doesn't this call in to question any medications? Because if patients can get that result from known placebos, then what does that say about prescribed medicines?
They need the medicine initially in high doses. The drink causes their body to associate the curative effects of the medicine with it, then they lower the dosage of the med (patients are still taking it) BUT the body now thinks "hey, I take that drink and I get better" so you don't need *as much* medicine anymore. A lot of immune suppressing drugs have very bad side effects.
I've been doing this for years. None of the anxiety meds or dosages that I've tried have worked, but I kept taking them, hoping that I might get some benefit from the placebo effect (unfortunately it hasn't worked; I seem to be as immune to the placebo effect as the actual meds 😕).
Have you tried atarax (hydroxyzine)? Is your anxiety because of a specific thing like CO2 sensitivity anxiety or is it something else?
If you've become conditioned to expect nothing to work, that could really harm the efficacy of the placebo. :(
You'd need some cognitive behavioral therapy to break out of that, perhaps?
This is also why the last stages of pharmaceutical research aren't blinded, because in the real world people would also know what they're taking and even if much of the effect of a drug is placebo; if it works, it works. This is called external validity, where the goal is to define the real world effects of a drug as best as possible, rather than elucidating the exact ways in which it works and how precisely the drug affects certain biomarkers compared to placebo or established treatment under blinding (which is called internal validity)
I’m wondering if the reverse is also true. If you’re convinced that a medication won’t work, can it be less effective?
Look up "nocebo effect".
What if they were just told it was a placebo but didnt fully believe it? I know if i were in a medical trial I would be very conscious of the fact I could be in the placebo group. Same suspicion could arise but flipped? Oh they told me it's a placebo but maybe it's actually real medicine?
0:15 "supposebly"? really?
great...now I need a placebo that makes me think I heard, "supposedly"
stopped watching after that!
@@Arinaramilo you must be fun at parties.
Technically, everything that's supposed is necessarily supposable. So people who say "supposably" are correct--just less specific than those who say "supposedly." (By the way, it bugs me too, but pointing it out usually gets one nowhere.) :)
@@jeremydavis3631 by the way, it bugs me when people don't like my humour
;)
ya, I've realized nothing I say matters...it's just for the lawls these days
Idk...I have taken actual medicine for depression and didn't get better...keep getting told by a friend I have to "choose" to get better(meaning she wants me to believe in basically a placebo), but if actual medication doesn't work, then me pretending isn't going to do anything either?
so i don't need a placebo if i decide that my brain can just heal me?
As mentioned (but not stressed clearly enough IMO) this applies to symptoms involving perception of pain, anxiety, irritation, and other hormonal responses to stimuli. It's not a _cure_ for disease or a method to heal things; it's basically a therapeutic treatment that works on symptoms but not causes. That has benefits, but it's easy to overstate or misunderstand the scope of utility and jump to (potentially dangerous) conclusions about taking placebos well outside of the applicability here.
this makes me think that literally no medicine has any real effect
Every time they do an episode on placebos apparently being the best thing ever, I just think that we're probably a good ten years before that's ALL that they'll give poor or marginalized people as far as medicine goes. Like, active medicine is going to become the domain of the rich and so if you're poor and have some kind of condition, they're just going to give you a placebo with the word "placebo" on the bottle and if you don't get better from that it's because you didn't BELIEVE hard enough in it and you'll be blamed for not trying hard enough to make your own brain do something. Also, the placebo effect might wear off when people start having or continue to have symptoms because they needed real medicine and quickly associate the word "placebo" with "doesn't do anything" and "I'm still going to be in pain/have symptoms".
Would this even applies for home remedies? I mean, people can be convinced regardless or just use them even if they're sure it barely works
Yes and no. Some home remedies will literally make you sicker because no amount of belief will mitigate the bad effects (e.g. smearing butter on sunburn makes it far worse but used to be the default home remedy 50 or 70 years ago, and trying to cure autism in your child by feeding them bleach will damage their insides, possibly irreparably, or even kill them) but drinking fridged lemon water despite having a healthy balanced diet normally (I.e. you aren't actually making a difference because you are just gonna pee out the vitamin c) might make you feel less stressed about the shitty situation and make you heal a bit faster because of that and the placebo effect.
(I should add that a few home remedies are actually legit, e.g. licorice for easing coughs)
Fascinating, but I think I've been away for too long, because I don't recognize the speaker.
They cycle through different speakers.
He joined psyshow a couple of months ago, but doesn't do every episode.
I have degenerative Osteoarthritis in my spine and knees. I take morphine twice a day to deal with the crippling pain. It also leaves me exceptionally tired so I have to sleep during the day.
If I could get over the tiredness with a placebo or even replace my morphine with one, I would.
But as I'm scientifically minded I wouldn't expect a placebo to have any effect if I knew it was such.
Did they consider the possibility that the patients thought they were receiving a *real* drug marked placebo? I can only imagine some people think it's so ridiculous to be _told_ you'll be taking a placebo that they just assume they're being put up to opposite shenanigans
I wonder what experiment I can make of this that helps the study??
can this be explained because people take pills with water, and extra water is good?
Can this be controlled by injection placebos instead?
Unsure if this video made it more likely an open placebo drug working on me, or made it less likely.
Is PSYCHOANALYSIS results only PLACEBO ?!
Honestly this video makes me wonder if my cure-all for when I get sick or start feeling super down (a nice hot bowl of pho, which is a Vietnamese noodle soup) is a placebo or if it just genuinely helps, and, more importantly, if it even matters.
Now give them placebos, tell them they cause super powers. Free super powers.
Please refer to David Firth's health reminder animated series for more insight into this topic.
I get this, though. There have definitely been times where I did something that I knew wouldn't really help, and yet I felt better for doing it. Haven't we all?
Now I want green strawberry flavoured milk! :o
Easy to make :)
@@Call-me-Al Oh, you're right, actually. Only where can I buy strawberry flavour?
The brain learning about itself. 🤯
I'm quite worried about the adequate disclosure there. Saying something is a placebo or "like a sugar pill" doesn't adequately explain the treatment if the patient doesn't know what "placebo" means and/or doesn't know that "like a sugar pill" means it's ineffective. The very fact a physician gives it to the patient suggests it is a medical treatment with potential medical benefits.
Now... maybe we're okay with physicians lying to patients with regards to placebos, and not receiving genuine informed consent. But there's ambiguity in (at least) the descriptions of these disclosures, and that's troublesome.
If a physician said to me "I'm prescribing this placebo to you; sometimes the routine of taking a medically inert placebo tricks the brain into getting better," then I know what I'm in for. But if the physician says "I'm prescribing X to you; we've found that some people who take X get better, though the numbers are small - indeed, comparable to that of a placebo," then that's misleading.
You didn't mention that open label placebos are not as effective as normal placebos.
Research needs to be done on what conditions make an effective placebo effect most likely.
So placebos work best on things that can not be objectively measured?
My grandma used to have a little bottle of pills that said "placebos."
THANK U SOO MUCH SIR
TODAY I GAIN A LOT OF KNOWLEDGE
My sickness often goes away tempirarily when i have to go to school.
And terrible on days i dont have it.
Just an observation.
Are you ok at home? Some people get stressed from being around family and then start associating home with bad things, then your body reacts (like how depression and anxiety can cause physical issues). It's called the nocebo effect, it's the opposite of placebo.
And that's why I don't understand the attack standard medicine rides against homeopathy, as long as that is limited to relatively mild and non-life-threatening ailments.
In many cases the feeling of being taken care of is the major contributing factor in the improvement of the patient.
So why forgo this powerful arrow in the quiver?
Correlation is not causation. But try telling my brain that!
NO-CEBO effect...?? How does this work then?
The placebo effect squared!
I knew this (only read the title) easy to use for yourself when your cold
But can you believe your own lie? Probably.
I wonder if one can self - medicate successfully with placebos. I wonder if making people take placebos while they are taking a handful of Rx's already would backfire.
That got me thinking. If I know that placebos can make me feel better nonetheless, when I take a sugar pill I'm thinking that the placebo effect WILL make me feel better... And this thought alone "activates" the placebo effect.
Plus, all the "habits tricking the brain into thinking it's actual medication" stuff
Hm, so assuming I take pill A to reduce my blood pressure and after a few days my doctor finds out that there's actually something else wrong with me so he gives me pill B, which may be a placebo. Assuming also that I am a well behaved pavlonian dog, will my brain still reduce my blood pressure despite me having swapped pills...
5:30 The pharmaceutical industry will ensure that this does not happen.
I thought Pavolv used bells, not metronomes.
Everyone reports that, but it was apparently not so. Can't seem to find the origin of the bell myth, though. Would be interesting to know where that started.
@@JosephDavies For me it started with my science teacher.
@@AidanRatnage I'm curious about where they got it from. It's an old myth.
As strange as it may sound, perhaps saying, “this is like taking a sugar pill” or “this is a placebo” may not be getting the point across that they are medically inert?
In the case of calling it a sugar pill, there’s a lot of popular press to the effect that sugar is a drug. In the case of calling it a placebo, there may be people who don’t know what the word “placebo” means.
Tic tacs, the new placebo
This is why I want to start practicing placebo witchcraft. If you feel ill and someone gives you water to feel better. It may work. But if someone puts that same water in a potion bottle and applies food coloring in a witch costume. It's going to work WAYYYY better. The magic is the placebo effect and is further boosted by the aesthetic
Be sure to ask for the extra strength placebos.
More interestingly, expensive placebo is more effective than inexpensive placebo. This discovery also won the 2008 Ig Nobel Prize of Medicine
The nastier and more uncomfortable the procedure also works. a small pill < big cumbersome pill < big rectal pill < nasty drink < injection but self-administered < injection by GP < injection/iv in hospital < small operation < big under aenesthesia operation (but they don't treat). All fun times.
17 - 97 percent?? That's...quite the range.
This is possibly also why alternative medicine works.
Placebos where first used to disprove infective medication in the 1800s
Mistake: Pavlov associated the ring of a bell with food, not the click of a metronome
He did both. He actually did tons of experiments!
@@sarahsqueeks I didn't know he did the same experiment with a metronome 😬 now I know!
It's cool. You're here to learn, not to know everything, and his other studies aren't as popular. :)
bruh i medicate myself all the time. like just last night i took lsd and mdma and they i candyflipped but when i get a placebo from my guy my brain associates it with anger and fukin rage
Do you suppose it might work in the opposite direction? If I gave you a joint of primo diesel and told you it was sh*t weed, would you not get high?
is it not just the feeling someone cares, that makes us feel better?
we have become so antisocial, we dont even see how much we need 'love'
i just wont believe when my doctor gives me a mentos, that it will do anything besides strengthening our interpersonal bond...
Placebos are seriously underrated and demonized. If your body can trick itself into getting better, that's awesome! Of course it won't cure cancer or any other serious diseases, but it can definitely help cope.
This needs better research. The placebo effect is something that relates not to the act of taking the so called placebo pill, but to the statistical measure of effect that's observed (either positive or negative) which isn't related to the active compound being studied. That's why there's very little evidence on placebo "working" on conditions where the outcome isn't just a perception, a feeling or something self-reported (pain, happiness, relief, etc). Let's see those placebos dropping cholesterol levels, diminishing HIV serology or prolonging cancer overall survival
good one sci show
I can see the doctors and insurance now. He need this treatment... It's a very expensive cutting edge new technology, a $4000 sugar pill! They will do anything to bill the hell out of your insurance
I had the same thought.
I also find psychology really interesting but usually if I have any feeling toward brains it's that they're the worst
brains are the worst ?? wow yeah why not .. after all a brain only contains more cells than the entire universe has stars, a brain operates faster than anything per second and it can consciously recognize reality .. it can solve problems while you're sleeping and dreaming .. it can distinguish between important memories and rubbish .. it can memorize the most complex date within a blink ..
but yeah let's go with your assumption instead!
@@evilloooo I have a debilitating concoction of mental illness and constantly get reminded of things that I regret but yeah my perspective is entirely unreasonable.
I have another hypothesis. What if the person simply FORGETS that they're taking a placebo? I mean I know that I take my medicine every day without really thinking about what I am taking, just that it's something I need to take. So I can see a person whose been on medicine that works for a while and then switching to a placebo forgetting that it's a placebo...so you still get the placebo effect.
what if all or most medications are purely placebo
patients are told that placebos are effective, and so that makes the placebo effective even tho they know it is
WHICH MEANS THE PLACEBO EFFECT CAN BE ITS OWN PLACEBO EFFECT
*WHAT*
I'm sure it work work either way, as long as you want it to make you feel better, regardless of whether or not it's a placebo or not. What matters is that your brain makes you feel better when you take it. :) The brain is a powerful thing. You want to feel more pain? Just convince your brain you are in a lot of pain. You are tired of it and want less pain? Same thing, just convince the brain that you are not in a lot of pain.
I would guess that the same people who got better with placebos, also can be hypnotized fairly easy.
"Aren't brains just the best? Mine thinks so, anyway"