• Question: why do placebos work?

    Asked by giraffeee2 to Charlie, Eoin, Jemma, Julian, Steve on 21 Mar 2011.
    • Photo: Eoin Lettice

      Eoin Lettice answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Placebos work by tricking the mind into thinking that something is being done to help make the person better!
      It’s like when you’re small and you fall over and hurt your knee and your mum or dad would rub it better for you. This isn’t really helping us physical but mentally we feel better!
      Placebos make us feel better and sometimes that is all we need to get our bodies into a better shape and fighting off diseases.

      Eoin

    • Photo: Julian Rayner

      Julian Rayner answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Hi girafeee. Another great question! The placebo effect is really interesting, and potentially very powerful. Some people have even suggested using it as a therapy – giving people with diseases that can’t be treated a placebo and see if it helps (although there are some pretty significant ethical problems with that!).

      In general, it is thought that just generic medical experiences can make people feel better, and things like mood and emotion have complicated interactions with disease that we don’t fully understand. Even just going to a doctor and telling them how you feel can help. Placebos are the same thing – your mind says “this is going to help me get better”, and it does, some of the time. The mechanism behind it in the brain is not really known, but maybe Jemma might know some more?

      Incidentally, that is probably why so many people believe homeopathy works – it is largely a placebo effect. Funnily enough, there haven’t been many placebo-controlled trials to find out…

    • Photo: Stephen Moss

      Stephen Moss answered on 18 Mar 2011:

      Hi Giraffeee2

      This is a good question. Placebos do work, but not always, and generally not as well as real medicines. Often when we’re ill and we take some medicine, our belief that the medicine will make us better is so strong, that we would feel better even if we just take a fake tablet. Of course, a placebo only works if you don’t know it’s a placebo.

    • Photo: Charlie Ryan

      Charlie Ryan answered on 19 Mar 2011:

      hi giraffe sorry i am no biologist – can i leave this one to someone with a little more knowledge. I think i remember what a placebo is but no much more!!

    • Photo: Jemma Ransom

      Jemma Ransom answered on 21 Mar 2011:

      Nobody really knows. A placebo effect is where a drug that has no activity in the body produces an affect when you tell somebody that it will. Amazingly, if a patient doesn’t believe that a medication that is proven to work will do anything to improve their condition, the effect of the drug is diminished, so the placebo also works in reverse. We don’t really know how it works, but I think there must be a strong psychological mechanism at play here. It is however a real effect, and when we are designing drugs – for instance pain killers – we have to prove that it works to a level above and beyond that of the placebo effect.

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