Placebos can have a powerful healing effect on the body and mind

Today, placebos play a crucial role in medical studies in which some participants are given the treatment containing the active ingredients of the medicine, and others are given a placebo. These types of studies help tell researchers which medicines are effective and how effective they are. Surprisingly, in some areas of medicine, placebos themselves provide patients with clinical improvement.

Real-life placebo effects

The Food and Drug Administration, the organization that regulates which medicines are allowed to go to the consumer market, requires that all new medicines be tested in randomized controlled trials that show they are better than placebo treatments. This is an important part of ensuring the public has access to high-quality medications.

But studies have shown that the placebo effect is so strong that many drugs don’t provide more relief than placebo treatments. In those instances, drug developers and researchers sometimes see placebo effects as a nuisance that masks the treatment benefits of the manufactured drug. That sets up an incentive for drug manufacturers to try to do away with placebos so that drugs pass the FDA tests.

But according to psychologist and placebo expert Irving Kirsch, who has studied placebo effects for decades, a large part of what makes antidepressants helpful in alleviating depression is the placebo effect — in other words, the belief that the medication will be beneficial.

Depression is not the only condition for which medical treatments are actually functioning at the level of placebo. Many well-meaning clinicians offer treatments that appear to work based on how patients get better. But a recent study reported that only 1 in 10 medical treatments sampled met the standards of what is considered by some to be the gold standard of high-quality evidence, according to a grading system by an international nonprofit organization. This means that many patients improve even though the treatments they receive have not actually been proved to be better than the placebo.

The power of the placebo comes down to the power of the mind and a person’s skill at harnessing it. If a patient gets a tension headache and their trusted doctor gives them a medicine that they feel confident will treat it, the relief they expect will probably decrease their stress. And since stress is a trigger for tension headaches, the magic of the placebo response is not so mysterious anymore.

Now let’s say that the doctor gives the patient an expensive brand-name pill to take multiple times per day. Studies have shown that it is even more likely to make them feel better because all of those elements subtly convey the message that they must be good treatments.

Placebos also work by creating expectations and conditioned responses. Most people are familiar with Pavlovian conditioning. A bell is rung before giving dogs meat that makes them salivate. Eventually, the sound of the bell causes them to salivate even when they do not receive any meat. A recent study from Harvard Medical School successfully used the same conditioning principle to help patients use less opioid medication for pain following spine surgery.

Furthermore, multiple brain imaging studies demonstrate changes in the brain in response to successful placebo treatments for pain. This is excellent news, given the ongoing opioid epidemic and the need for effective pain management tools. There is even evidence that individuals who respond positively to placebos show increased activity in areas of the brain that release naturally occurring opioids.

In addition to the increasing body of evidence surrounding their effectiveness, placebos offer multiple benefits. They have no side effects. They are cheap. They are not addictive. They provide hope when there might not be a specific chemically active treatment available. They mobilize a person’s own ability to heal through multiple pathways, including those studied in the field of psychoneuroimmunology. This is the study of relationships between the immune system, hormones and the nervous system.

By defining a placebo as the act of setting positive expectations and providing hope through psychosocial interactions, it becomes clear that placebos can enhance traditional medical treatments.

The placebo effect is recognized as being powerful enough that the American Medical Association considers it ethical to use placebos to enhance healing on their own or with standard medical treatments if the patient agrees to it.

Clinically, doctors use the principles of placebo in a more subtle way than it is used in research studies. A 2013 study from the United Kingdom found that 97 percent of physicians acknowledged in a survey having used some form of placebo during their career. This might be as simple as expressing a strong belief in the likelihood that a patient will feel better from whatever treatment the doctor prescribes, even if the treatment itself is not chemically powerful.

But with the medical field’s growing acceptance and promotion of placebo effects, we can envision a time when patients and clinicians take pride in their skill at harnessing the placebo response.