What Is The Placebo Effect And How Does It Work?

A placebo is an inert substance or a medical treatment without any therapeutic properties, while the placebo effect or placebo response is the consequence of its administration. This effect consists of an organic or mental change related to the symbolic meaning attributed to an event or object in the field of health.

What is the placebo effect of a medication? This term placebo derives from the Latin verb pleasure, which literally means “I will like.” In medicine it refers to any inert substance biologically inactive, with no intrinsic therapeutic capacity, is presented to the patient as an effective remedy and is then administered to induce psychotherapeutic suggestion or to make comparisons with drugs in clinical trials.

Probably the most complete definition of placebo is provided by Dr. AK Shapiro: any procedure deliberately applied to obtain an effect or that, although unknown, acts on the patient or on the symptom or disease, but that objectively It lacks any specific activity with respect to the condition being treated. This procedure can be applied with or without medical directives regardless of the type of medication used.

Attempts to explain why placebos work have involved behavioral scientists and biologists in the latter half of the 20th century. The placebo effect and its operating principles have predominantly been understood and interpreted in psychological terms.

If you are wondering how the placebo effect works, it is an underlying psychosomatic mechanism in the sense that the nervous system, in response to the full meaning of expectations given to the prescribed placebo therapy, induces neurovegetative modifications and produces numerous endorphins, hormones mediators, capable of modifying your perception of pain your hormonal balances, your cardiovascular response and your immune response.

When does the placebo effect appear?

An essential requirement for the placebo effect to manifest is the autosuggestion of the person taking it. In other words, the patient must be convinced that he is taking an effective treatment and trust it, or at least he must be induced to believe it by the doctor prescribing the treatment. In this article, we tell you more about how the human mind works.

It is important to emphasize that the placebo effect is due to the psychosocial context in which the treated patient is located. It consists of any object or person related to the treatment, capable of communicating with the patient who is receiving treatment and, therefore, a reduction in symptoms is expected to occur in the near future.

Until recently, much of the therapeutic effects of medicine were due to the placebo effect, for example, to strange mixtures prepared with blood or animal parts, etc. However, when talking about the therapeutic effect of placebo, one should not make the mistake of attributing to it any clinical improvement observed in patients who take it. Placebo effects can be due to many other factors:

• Natural improvement and spontaneous: It has been observed that many patients tend to go to the doctor in the most acute phase of the disease, which would then tend to improve spontaneously due to its natural course.
• Independent factors: a new love, a win, a vacation, etc. These situations lead you to perceive an improvement in your health, while, in other cases, you may report the benefits obtained only because you want to please the doctor.

These are some of the examples of the placebo effect. In fact, to measure the placebo effect it is necessary to exclude a series of factors that have nothing to do with the real placebo effect.

The placebo effect may be the link that unites the defenders and detractors of the calls alternative medicines< In the varied and unequal group of alternative medications, there are all those therapeutic practices whose effectiveness has not been subject to controlled clinical monitoring or that he has not overcome it.

The fact that the effectiveness of an alternative medicine cannot be demonstrated through the randomized clinical trials mentioned above does not necessarily mean that it is totally useless for the patient: the placebo effect could explain positive experiences of doctors and patients who successfully decide to resort to alternative treatments.