Placebos may have benefits, even though people know they are taking them

A study presents physiological evidence that treatments honestly presented as placebos can still provide benefits.

Whenever a person receives treatment, it really is natural for them to expect, or at least hope, that it'll provide some benefit. Sometimes this expectation alone can create a positive effect, normally occurs in studies where participants unknowingly get a placebo instead of actual medication.

Now, a fresh study finds that even though researchers tell persons that what they'll receive contains no substances, a placebo can produce a positive neurobiological effect.

The analysis, from researchers at Michigan State University, University of Michigan, and Dartmouth College, is published in Nature Communications.

In clinical trials, researchers usually do not typically inform control-group participants they have already been given placebos which contain no active ingredients.

Such “deceptive” placebos sometimes may actually produce benefits, which implies they could have value on their own as a safe, inexpensive method of helping patients.

However, the study notes that “a significant ethical issue prevents their widespread use: the ubiquitous belief that for placebos to be effective, a person must be deceived into believing they are taking a dynamic treatment.”

The analysis investigates the potential of “nondeceptive” placebos. With these substances, researchers inform individuals about how placebos are used, and they will get a placebo that might provide beneficial effects.

“Placebos are about ‘mind over matter.’ Nondeceptive placebos were born to ensure that you could possibly utilize them in routine practice. So rather than prescribing a host of medications to greatly help an individual, you could provide them with a placebo, inform them it can help them, and it’s likely that - if indeed they believe it could, then it'll.”

- study co-author Jason Moser, Michigan State University, East Lansing, Michigan

The study notes that earlier research involved individuals self-reporting beneficial effects from nondeceptive placebos. They were for conditions that included irritable bowel syndrome, experimental pain, chronic back pain, too little psychological well-being, emotional distress, and poor sleep quality.

However, researchers consider such self-reports to be less empirically reliable and convincing than physiological measurement of effects.

There were a few studies that investigate possible physiological changes made by nondeceptive placebos.

The authors of the current study advise previous researchers may have been looking in the wrong place, seeking improvements in areas which may be less responsive to the placebo effect, such as for example wound-healing recovery rates and physical skin reactions.

By contrast, the brand new study looks at the brain’s emotional stress levels as a far more plausible target for a placebo effect.