Believe it or not, but the future of medicine may not just be in taking a few pills to cure a sickness. Recently, scientists have discovered that your brain may hold to key to recovering from illness. In several studies conducted, scientists have discovered that people tend to get better when taking a “drug” that they think will make them better.

The thing is - they’re not really taking a drug.

Placebos are actually fake drugs that are used to make people believe that the drug will cure them. In many cases, by simply thinking they will be cured of a certain aliment - the patients cure themselves. The placebos themselves are usually either sugar pills or salt pills, but they really could be made of anything under the sun.

Today, placebos are used in almost every clinical study, and they are marred with controversy. While some people believe the placebo effect to be a true concept, there are many others that have conducted research that proves otherwise. In May of 2001, a group of researchers from the University of Copenhagen conducted an experiment in which they attempted to measure the effectiveness of the placebo effect. The researchers noticed that the participants in the group who were not given any treatment healed at relatively the same rates as the patients who were given the placebo treatment. They did, however, find that the placebos worked well when it came to pain relief.

With all of these arguments against it, could the placebo effect truly be real? Up until now, there has not been a decent explanation for how positive expectations translate to pain relief or an alleviation of symptoms. A man named Tor Wager and his research team has recently made a breakthrough at Columbia University. To test out the placebo effect, he and his group of researches gathered participants and then separated them accordingly for the experiment.

On all groups, he applied a hot stimulus (sometimes painfully hot) to the forearms of the participants. He informed some of the participants that the placebo cream to be applied was a pain reliever, while he told others that the cream did nothing to relieve pain.

Then, using a positron emission tomography, or a PET scan, Wager and his team measured the brain activity of all of the participants. It was then that Wager noticed that the brains of all of the people in the placebo group released high levels of opioids, a natural painkiller, proving the placebo effect to be true. What does this mean for the medical world? Details are still sketchy, but as more and more research is conducted on the placebo effect, psychology just may be the science used to cure a person’s aliments. Who knows, before you know it, we may just be curing ourselves with our minds!

- Katrina Boston, intern at Science Friday/TalkingScience

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 15th, 2008 at 2:53 pm and is filed under Health . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.