Can I Take A Placebo When I Know It’s A Placebo?
Placebos are often misunderstood as fake treatments. In the past, they were delivered as disguised sugar pills or even fake surgeries but what makes them nearly miraculous is the fact that despite their inert nature, they can work. Once the brain is convinced the placebo ought to work, it goes to work relieving your symptoms.
However, today doctors around the world are providing patients with placebo treatments labeled placebos, and those treatments work as well. There are many questions regarding the use of placebos and one of the most common is, “Can I take a placebo when I know it’s a placebo?” Let us discuss this further in the article.
Well Known Placebos
A new study in the Public Library Of Science ONE (vol.5, NO 12) suggests that a placebo still works even when the patient knows that they are being given a fake pill or a fake treatment. Many years ago, Harvard Medical School researcher Ted Kaptchuk and his colleagues from Harvard and Beth Israel Deaconess medical center in Boston wanted to prescribe placebos while telling the patients that it’s a placebo.
He wanted to know if placebo treatments could produce positive results when the patient knew they were receiving a placebo. He said, “ Everyone around me thought I was nuts”. But his team carried out the study and recruited 80 people with irritable bowel syndrome.
He divided his patients into two groups, one group was given no treatment at all and the other group was given tablets which were labeled as placebos. After three weeks of monitoring and observing the patients, the results finally came out. The results told that 59% of those who received the placebos reported relief from their symptoms while the other 35% didn’t get relief because they were not given a placebo or any other pill.
That was phenomenal. After the test was carried out Kaptchuk said “One possibility of why known placebos work is that the ritual of taking medicine itself might induce the body to produce endorphins that relieve pain”. Kaptchuk assured people that even if we are taking known-placebos they will work.
All that matters is that your brain should be convinced because when that happens your body will heal eventually. However, just the act of giving placebos to the patients while they know it’s a placebo is not enough. Doctors play a major role in this phenomenon. When the doctors are prescribing the pill to the patients their body language matters a lot. They should adopt a much more certain and assuring attitude towards the patient. This will definitely help the sufferer.
Think Positive And Win The Game
In all this process the focal point is an expectation combined with positive thinking. One must expect positive results to get positive results. Once your mind starts to believe that you can heal your body does that automatically. The legendary boxer Muhammad Ali is known to have quoted “If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it then I can achieve it”.
Placebos and your mind work together and when they do the results can be unexpectedly amazing. The moral of the story here is that when you want to restore your health you may be able to do it in no time. However, when you lose hope and give up on yourself there are no chances for you.
There are people in this world who give up and lock themselves up and wait for death to come, even though that is so NOT the right path or the right thing to do. To remain healthy one has to remain positive no matter what.
Negativity is a disease itself and one has to fight it and remain persistent against it.