The Truth About Placebos
Thanks for joining me on this journey of my first few posts. I’m going to start with a series of posts on the mind-body connection, which is a topic that’s really interested me since I got viral meningitis almost two years ago. Here’s a link to the main article I’ll be going over Placebos.
What are we talking about?
The article discusses treating irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) with placebo pills. Let’s define some terms here. IBS is a chronic condition that’s infamous for its shitty symptoms like abdominal pain, cramping, bloating, gas, and constipation/diarrhea. It’s also pretty well linked to anxiety. Placebos are harmless pills or procedures prescribed to a group of patients in drug trials (not the kind the article is talking about), or as psychological relief to patients. I hope you all know by now* that psychological placebos work (we don’t know why yet, but they do). In order for them to work, the patient needs to be deceived into thinking that they’re getting medicine. At least that’s what we thought.
What did the scientists do?
The Harvard researchers took 80 people with IBS, and gave half of them a placebo pill and the second group no treatment other than their interactions with nurses or doctors at the checkups. The placebo group was told that they’re receiving “placebo pills made of an inert substance, like sugar pills, that have been shown in clinical studies to produce significant improvement in IBS symptoms through mind-body self-healing processes.” The researchers evaluated the patients at 3 points over a 3 week period.
What happened next?
Well if I’m writing about it, most of them must’ve started feeling better. Here’s what’s most interesting though; not only did the placebo group get better and report a higher quality of life, many people from the group that was just having a doctor listen to them at the 3 evaluations did too**!
What does that mean they got better?
The primary measures the researchers used were the IBS global improvement scale and the IBS symptom severity scale. Both of these scales are scored based on surveys filled out by the patients. A patient reporting how they feel does make it difficult to give a hard number of improvement (and it will also be meaningless in this context). End of the day, the patients are the ones suffering from IBS; if the patient says their quality of life has improved, we have no reason to doubt that it has.
Why is this important?
Even when the patients were told directly that the pill they were taking were not going to heal them pharmacologically, they were able to allow their mind to take control over their body and convince themselves it would. Even some of the people from the non-placebo group were able to apply some of the same mind-healing principles in order to feel better.
How this is not clickbait science?
The Harvard study was done in 2010 with a group of 80 people with IBS. That’s a relatively small scientific study. Since then there have been numerous studies done with more patients and more conditions/diseases. Here’s one on how people’s allergic rhinitis was alleviated by open-label placebo. Here’s another on how an open-label placebo even helped produce antipsychotic effects in schizophrenic patients (this was done in an extension study). Search “open-label placebos” on Google Scholar and you will find plenty more articles. Again, we still do not understand the mechanisms of how placebos and open-label placebos work, but try and convince yourself that you can heal yourself with your mind the next time you reach for the Tylenol or Advil.
*Read this article if you didn’t know that placebos work/want to learn more about them.
** What was special about this group is that they also knew the pill the other group was getting was a placebo. Maybe that’s what helped some of the people get better. The researchers also suggest that long doctor visits with an attentive doctor might have helped (need more research to find out, but I will touch on the matter of “attention in healthcare” in another post).
