The Placebo Effect

 by Mahir Asef

(image: Diana Polekhina)

The placebo effect is the beneficial effect that people feel after being administered a look-alike drug which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo meaning that the improvements must be due to the patient's belief in the drug. It can be interpreted as the effect a person feels when they believe they have treated their body in the correct way to defeat their disease. 

A placebo is used in clinical trials to determine whether a drug is effective in alleviating the symptoms or curing the symptoms of a disease. If both groups in the trial have the same response following the administration of the placebo and drug, it can be concluded that the drug is not effective. The placebo effect is only effective if it appears to the patient that they have received the drug. In the early years of the use of a placebo, it was deemed a failure to have a placebo effect, however, it is now understood that when there is a placebo effect there has to be a non-pharmacological mechanism at work. While the placebo will not decrease the size of a tumour it can be effective at curing symptoms that are created by the brain. It can be assumed that while the placebo may not lengthen the life of a person it can take away some of the pain that remains in the despairing, desperate and despondent patient. 

However, there is a problem with this effect, many argue that giving someone a placebo is not the equivalent of administering no treatment and being truthful about it straight away, they argue that you are tricking the person into believing their body should begin to cure itself. When, in reality, the person is feeling the short term and occasional long-term benefits of pain relief administered by their body as a result of the lies they have been fed. This conclusion would lead you to believe that there is no placebo effect as the placebo was created to be the equivalent of no treatment but we know now this not to be true. Therefore, you would be led to believe that the effects caused by the placebo were just results of you treating your body healthily while being in a good mindset. However, this is hard to replicate without the administration of no drugs as it requires hope and someone with a disease is highly unlikely to believe it can be cured without a drug or some sort of medicine making it near-impossible to create the ‘placebo effect’ without the settings of a clinical trial and without any sort of drug, fake or not.