In medicine today, placebos serve a specific purpose. In the form of sugar pills or pretend treatments, placebos provide a benchmark against which researchers can compare drugs and other medical interventions.
"If people get better, we want to know if it's because [of] the drug we gave them, or is it spontaneous remission, or is it because of the doctor-patient interaction, or is it because of the ritual of taking pills?" says , a professor at Harvard Medical School.
Placebos allow researchers to separate out those factors from the influence of the drug itself. They enable doctors to determine whether a treatment does what it's purported to do.
Outside the setting of a clinical trial, you're unlikely to find physicians dispensing placebos. The reasoning is simple. It's long been assumed that the placebo effect can only take place when patients don't know they're taking a placebo.
But recently, researchers like Ted Kaptchuk began to question whether our assumptions about placebos were valid.
"Everyone believed that deception or concealment is necessary for people to respond to placebo because the idea was, you fake people, you trick them. I sat with myself for a long time, read the literature and I said, 'You know what. No one's tested that ever in history. What's going on here?'"
This week on Hidden Brain, we consider what it means to be sick and what it means to heal, and the powerful tool that modern medicine has overlooked.
Additional Resources
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