Of all the strange things I encounter in indulging my love and hate of alternative ideas, the placebo effect is the strangest. A guest writer covered this last year but I wanted to revisit it to hammer home just how weird the placebo effect is. What marks the placebo effect out from other wacky ideas and supposed paranormal phenomena is that it is real.
A placebo is anything that seems to be a “real” medical treatment, but isn’t. It could be a pill, a shot, a spell, a potion, or anything a person is told will make them feel better. What all placebos have in common is that they do not contain an active substance that demonstrably affects health.
But they can affect health. Placebos are effective in a large enough percentage of people that doctors routinely prescribe them to patients.
The best scientific hypothesis I can find for how the placebo effect could work is that if you are sick or hurt, it takes a lot of energy to get better or heal. Taking a placebo medication could trick your brain that your body is getting help with the healing process, and so it will put extra effort into healing, “believing” it is receiving energy from an outside source. This could be the reason many alternative therapies seem to work even though they perhaps logically shouldn’t have any affect on your health or wellbeing.
The weirdest thing of all with the placebo effect is that it can work even if you know it is a placebo. I, the killjoy sceptic, feel better when I hold onto pretty “healing” crystals, even though I know they can’t be doing anything beneficial for me.
The placebo effect’s evil twin is the “nocebo,” which can make you feel sick even if you have no reason to. The two work together in parts of our lives beyond the world of medicine. If you spend all day talking about how tired and bored you are, you may cause yourself to feel tired and bored. Conversely, if you approach a difficult task and think: “I am excited about doing this,” you may achieve it more easily than if you approach it with fear.
The placebo effect is an example of how freakin’ weird our brains are. Human brains are so peculiar; you could swear they have a mind of their own.