What is the placebo effect and how can it be used to help patients?

Article Date: 25th January 2016

We thought we’d share with you this interesting video explaining the frequently asked question, what is the placebo effect? The video features NHS Choices best-selling author and doctor Ben Goldacre talking about the fascinating phenomena.

The placebo effect is where people who are ill get better even though they have been given a dummy or sham treatment, such as a sugar pill or a fake operation where an incision is made but nothing else takes place.

Goldacre says this effect demonstrates the “the amazing power of the mind over the body” and that we really can make our pain better through our beliefs and expectations.

Remarkably, the placebo effect seems to works on everyone, regardless of how sceptical they may be and it has also been shown that children and animals respond to the placebo effect. After all, children look for signals from adults and if an adult has high expectations because a pill has been given to their child then this positivity is likely to transmit to the child.

We also know the colour of pills is important in treatments. People tend to find that green or blue pills have a sedating effect while red and orange pills are alerting. The pharmaceutical industry knows this and typically the packaging for anti-depressants tends to be green and white or blue and white. The packaging for stimulants or anti-biotics on the other hand tends to be bright red.

Several studies of pain and placebos has shown that a salt water injection that has no active ingredient in it is more effective at numbing pain that a sugar pill that looks like a pain killer. This is outcome is believed to be because an injection feels and looks like a more serious and dramatic treatment and that is why people experience more pain relief.

So what are the implications all this research?

Goldacre believes it leaves the medical profession in an “ethical hole” because the research shows that misleading your patients can help them get better.

And considering that giving someone a sugar pill doesn’t expose them to any physical side effects, some people might feel that giving patients placebo treatments is acceptable.

But Goldacre argues that this approach is problematic because to give a patient a placebo treatment requires doctors and other people working in the NHS to lie to them. Not only is this ethically wrong, he says, but in the long run word would eventually get out that doctors are lying on a regular basis and that would under-mind the credibility of everything said by people in the medical profession.

But where the placebo effect can be used effectively is in the delivery of treatments.

If treatments are given in a much more healing environment with a greater sense of positivity, with happier more confident people in nicer settings, this can genuinely improve the outcomes of our treatments.

It is realistic to say that the placebo effect can be used to take treatments we already know are effective and make them even better.