I, a child of eight cant understand what tablets for what thinking that as soon as i swallow it it makes me feel way better.
In my later years I did realize that tablets don work as soon as they enter your body, they need time. But i still I feel a bit of relief as soon as a gulp down a pill and say oh alright...
As they say its all in the mind...
And so I'd like to believe.
Placebo to me is a psychological state of mind.
In modern age , the placebo is used by psychiatrists to cure depression. My mom a practising gynaecologist says that for minor problems she usually uses a placebo, the patient dutifully reports back saying all is well, she says she hates it when patients get addicted to drugs which they wouldn't and didn't need in the first place.
there is certainly data that suggest that just being in the healing situation accomplishes something. Depressed patients who are merely put on a waiting list for treatment do not do as well as those given placebos. And -- this is very telling, I think -- when placebos are given for pain management, the course of pain relief follows what you would get with an active drug. The peak relief comes about an hour after it's administered, as it does with the real drug, and so on. If placebo analgesia was the equivalent of giving nothing, you'd expect a more random pattern ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).*
a young Seattle cardiologist named Leonard Cobb conducted a unique trial of a procedure then commonly used for angina, in which doctors made small incisions in the chest and tied knots in two arteries to try to increase blood flow to the heart. It was a popular technique -- 90 percent of patients reported that it helped -- but when Cobb compared it with placebo surgery in which he made incisions but did not tie off the arteries, the sham operations proved just as successful. The procedure, known as internal mammary ligation, was soon abandoned ("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000)
The idea of a powerful placebo in modern times originated with H K Beecher. He evaluated that over two dozen studies and calculated that about one-third of those studies improved due to the placebo effect.
The placebo effect may be quite harmful and dangerous in serious cases , may even be considered as a quack procedure.
Patients can become dependent on nonscientific practitioners who employ placebo therapies. Such patients may be led to believe they're suffering from imagined "reactive" hypoglycemia, nonexistent allergies and yeast infections, dental filling amalgam "toxicity," or that they're under the power of Qi or extraterrestrials. And patients can be led to believe that diseases are only amenable to a specific type of treatment from a specific practitioner (The Mysterious Placebo by John E. Dodes, Skeptical Inquirer, Jan/Feb 1997).
