Welcome to brain stuff. From how stuff works, everybody, I'm Christian Seger, and this is brain stuff. You have surely heard of placebos, their phony drugs that real drugs are tested against. But have you ever wondered how someone could be fooled into thinking they've received a powerful chemical compound when all they've been given is in a inert sugar pill. Well, fortunately some researchers have wondered too, and they've come up
with some really astounding answers. Placebo actually means I will please in Latin, and they take their name from mourners who are hired to be sad at funerals. Back in medieval times, the mourners were fake in the term eventually came to be applied to fake drugs. As many as half of all physicians admit to having used placebos in their general practices, usually in the form of vitamins. Back in the day, physicians used placebos when they had no
other avenues of treatment available. They had nothing to lose, and neither did the patients, so you know who cared. Placebos became a standard component of the double blind study, where participants are split into groups that either get the drug or get the placebo. The logic there is that if the real drug elicits a stronger response than the fake drug, you know, the placebo, then it's proven successful.
Bingo it works. The thing is, some researchers noticed that a lot of people in the double blind studies who received placebos still had positive reactions to them. As many as one third of all people respond favorably to placebos. And let's recap here. Sick people are given fake drugs like a sugar pill, and then they get better as a result. This is not supposed to happen, so studies were launched to find out what was going on. One two thousand four study in Michigan gave participants a painful
but harmless injection in their jaws. Then they were given a saline injection they were told was a pain reliever. Saline has no pain relieving properties, hence it was a placebo injection. Astoundingly, the researchers found that the pain levels went down in everyone in the study following this injection.
When viewed through a PET scan, the researchers found the participants brains had released endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, So a fake injection elicited a genuine biological response because of the placebo. The people's pain decreased, not just in their minds, but in actuality. And it's not just saline injections and
sugar pills that can elicit a placebo effect. What conventional medicine considers sham treatments like say acupuncture, have been shown to at least produce a placebo effect, and even sham sham treatments can to like for instance, in tests of acupuncture that use retractable needles. Even more sounding is the no sebo effect. Not only can fake drugs and treatments produce a positive response, people can suffer from negative side effects from placebo's two. So what is going on here? Well,
researchers explanations typically fall into two camps. The subject expectancy effect where people know what the outcome should be and unconsciously conform to that expected outcome, and classical conditioning like Pavlov's dogs, but instead of salivating at a bell, we experience relief through what we think is a drug. The jury, however, is still out on what exactly is behind the placebo effect. Ethically,
there's a wrestling match going on. On one hand, the idea that people can heal through the power of their own bodies rather than through powerful drugs that often have undesirable side effects. Well, it's a good thing. On the other informing patients truthfully is a tenet of modern medicine, and placebo's require pretty much outright lying by doctors. So what to do. Some clever physicians have figured out a loophole.
They can offer a placebo as a cure to a patient, but tell them they're not sure how the drug works. All that's missing is the wink and the nudge. Check out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com.