The placebo effect, in which people with complaints see improvement after being “treated” with fake drugs such as sugar, has been a long-discussed issue. And this debate continues today at full speed on social media platforms like X.
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Small studies suggest this effect exists, including one study that explained the placebo effect to a group for 15 minutes before administering it. Although there is no explanation, this group was able to endure the second half of the test (where heating plates were applied to their forearms and the heat was turned up until they could no longer stand) longer than the group that did not have this conversation but was given a placebo cream. Small studies even showed Parkinson’s patients improving their motor scores after taking a placebo.
Some clinicians believe in the placebo effect and prescribe placebos to their patients. A BMJ survey found that in the previous year, about 3 percent of doctors in the U.S. used saline as a placebo, 2 percent used sugar pills, 41 percent used over-the-counter analgesics, and 38 percent used vitamins.
“A small but significant proportion of physicians reported using antibiotics (86.13%) and sedatives (86.13%) as placebo treatments during the same period,” the authors write in their article.
There is such a thing as the placebo effect; But…
It seems that we can be sure that the placebo effect works, as doctors also use it. However, there are those who think that this should not be used because it is deceptive to patients. They also note that the placebo effect is largely a reflection of a disease’s already fluctuating natural history and “regression to the mean.”
To evaluate the effectiveness of placebos in 2001, a team conducted a systematic review of 114 clinical trials in which patients were randomly assigned to placebo groups or no treatment groups (of course, these trials also had a treatment group, but the main goal here was to compare patients who received placebos with patients who experienced the normal course of the disease ).
“In pooled data from studies with subjective or objective binary or continuous objective outcomes, we were unable to detect a significant effect of placebo compared to no treatment,” the team wrote in their study. “However, in trials with sustained subjective outcomes and involving pain treatment, we found a significant difference between placebo and no treatment,” he wrote, adding: “Outside the clinical trial setting, there is no justification for the use of placebo.” A follow-up study in 2004 analyzing 52 new trials found the same result.
In short, placebos appear to have a limited effect on patients’ self-reported pain and other subjective measures, but convincing evidence of a positive outcome on disease or a physiological mechanism explaining how they would work on disease appears to be lacking.
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