Your Brain on Placebo

A new study from one of my favorite periodicals, PAIN, has shed some light on the placebo effect. I know many of you look with some suspicion on this whole thing. You think placebo is something that crazy, or at least gullible, people make up – certainly not something that applies to a sane, intelligent person like you.

Some researchers have wondered if you might be right. They have theorized that the placebo effect is due to patients remembering an effect from the fake treatment, when in reality nothing happened.

To test this idea, they gave patients a painful stimulation twice. (Don’t ask how they inflicted the pain. But know you don’t want to participate in this kind of research.) The first time they told them they were giving them a painful stimulus. The second time they said they were doing the same thing, but had given them some medicine that decreased pain in many people.

During both of these events, they used functional MRI (f MRI) to look at how active the parts of the brain were that process pain. When they thought they were being treated, not only did they report less pain, but the areas of the brain that process pain were substantially less active.

Hmmm…….maybe there is something to this placebo thingy?

So, throw out the Vicadin and replace them with sugar pills?!! Unfortunately, even as much as your insurance company would love the savings, that’s not the lesson from this study. The take home from this study is that, while what’s going on in your head may not be the cause of your pain, it has a definite effect on how you actually feel.