Truth Be Told | Peddling hope in a placebo

Do you have chronic fatigue during the night hours? Do you get short of breath during strenuous exercise? Do summers make you sweat profusely? Ever feel yourself aging uncontrollably? If you said yes to any of these, or something loosely related, you may benefit from the newest miracle drug that has been with us for centuries!

Introducing Placebo!

That’s right, this cure-all can alleviate the symptoms of everything from explosive diarrhea to the rickets to massive internal bleeding! All natural! (Side effects may include feeling totally awesome.) There’s a pot of gold at the end of every placebo!

That mock ad wasn’t entirely facetious. Placebos are dummy pills usually used as controls in clinical studies. You might have heard of them in psychology studies that you’ve participated in. They have been shown time and time again to elicit reports of symptom relief from patients who take them. So much so, in fact, that some doctors give them to patients in secret. A little deceit, however, may not be the entire story behind this phenomenon.

“My goodness!” you might say. “How dare he not give me real drugs to ease my obvious suffering from this chronic nighttime fatigue?” The truth is that a doctor who slips you a placebo is, in fact, giving you something very potent to help you feel better. It just isn’t a drug per se. The placebo effect operates on the principle of deception — patients only get better if they don’t know which pills are which and they believe the drugs are working. This brings up an ethical dilemma that you might want to ponder for yourself: which is more important to you on that hospital bed — that you be informed or that you feel better?

Apparently the two aren’t mutually exclusive. A recent study done at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and Harvard Medical School found that patients reported feeling symptom relief even though they were actually told that they were taking placebos. The bottle even had a giant label reading “placebo” on it.

What?

This isn’t unlike a child continuing to set out milk and cookies for a Santa Claus who they have just been told doesn’t exist. A patient in that situation may not believe a doctor who has gone out of his or her way to inform them that they are taking fakes. “He can’t be serious. Doesn’t that violate some code? Is there a camera crew here?”

Whether or not this disbelief is due to a deep-seated mistrust of the healthcare system is a moot point. Either way, there seems to be an enduring hope that the pills are real.

The study also stated that the amount of relief that the patients reported was equal to some of the most powerful drugs, which points to the fact that our mind is literally more powerful than we think. If I do decide to hawk my drug in the near future, I’d say simply that I’m selling hope. As it turns out, it’s pretty powerful stuff. It seems now that as patients looking for relief from discomfort, anxiety or pain, we can get a little closer to bliss without all of the ignorance.

Given that there is a wealth of evidence that thinking happy thoughts actually is therapeutic, I’d say this Peter Pan placebo effect isn’t that far-fetched.

And why should it be? Why can’t the belief in a person’s skill, in a higher power or in the very chair you’re sitting on be the same belief that affects how your body consciously and unconsciously reacts to the world around you? Perhaps that’s the reason we feel a little better when a mother or a good friend tells us it’ll be okay.

Next time you start to feel a little tired pulling an all-nighter, swallow a Skittle and tell yourself it was a caffeine pill.

Mark Attiah is a first-year medical student from Dallas, Texas, who cares deeply about each and every one of his readers, including you. His e-mail address is attiah@theDP.com. Truth Be Told appears every other Thursday.

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