“Your mind is the most powerful thing in your control.” - Keith R. Holden M.D., Power of the Mind in Health and Healing
A placebo is a medical treatment or procedure created to trick participants in order to achieve good results without prescribing hard medicines or drugs. Even though it lacks any active ingredients, it frequently still has a physical impact on the person. The most common form is a sugar pill, but other forms include injections, capsules, tablets, and more. The intensity of their interventions varies depending on a variety of factors. An injection, for example, has a more substantial placebo effect than a tablet. Greater effects are produced by larger pills, stronger capsules than tablets, and two tablets work better than one.
It has been demonstrated that placebos cause observable, physiological changes, like
increased heart rate or blood pressure. However, conditions like depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, and chronic pain where symptoms are self-reported are those where placebo effects are most pronounced. Studies revealed that placebos can influence the signs of brain disorders. Levodopa, a dopamine drug, is frequently used to treat Parkinson's disease, a neurological condition characterized by low levels of the brain chemical dopamine. As with levodopa itself, research has shown that placebos can improve movement in Parkinson's patients by raising dopamine levels in their brains. Patients with Alzheimer's disease provide an intriguing example of how expectations affect the placebo effect. In people with mild to moderate Alzheimer's disease, placebos have been shown to be less effective in reducing complaints of physical pain. Additionally, patients with Alzheimer's disease frequently need higher doses of painkillers, possibly because they are no longer effective for them. Placing no expectations on them, both real medicine and placebos appear less effective.
You might have one question left at this point. How long has this medical idea been around, and who created it—or perhaps discovered it—first? Let's go over a quick history lesson of the placebo effect treatment. The famous placebo effect has a long and fascinating history. In the past, when useless pills and potions were frequently all that doctors had to offer, they undoubtedly played a significant role in medicine. When a British doctor named John Haygarth decided to test one of the expensive metal rods known as Perkins tractors, which were being sold at the time as quackery remedies and claimed to draw disease from the body. Haygarth set out to prove that the exorbitant price was unnecessary. He accomplished this by contrasting the outcomes from a set of pretend wooden tractors with those from a set of purportedly "active" metal tractors, and he then published the results in a book titled On the Imagination as a Cause & as a Cure of Disorders of the Body The term "placebo" has been around since 1772, but this was the first instance of the placebo effect that was actually proven to work. Haygarth realized that this is the reason why well-known physicians frequently have greater success than unproven ones. He even continued to say that the placebo effect played a significant role in a lot of modern medicine.
Following that significant scientifical achievement, a number of experts and psychologists tested this concept, until 1996 when it was made an official treatment with the conduct of an experiment of a placebo cream disguised as the drug trivaricane.
The development of the Placebo is intricate and controversial, but what it succeeds in without a doubt is taking a step forward to the understanding of the most intriguing machine we have ever discovered, the human brain.
Bibliography
https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect
https://ed.ted.com/lessons/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect-emma-bryce#discuss
https://knowablemagazine.org/article/mind/2017/imagination-effect-history-placebo-power
https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/306437
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