An Effective Placebo

Sugar has never tasted better...

Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away. Ta-Da... the placebo effect at work.


The placebo effect has always been of a muse for scientist ever since since its existence was discovered in the mid 1950's. Continual testing done throughout the past half-century has done little to unravel the mystery, in fact it has only deepened the abyss of perplexity. Researchers are now finding that placebos work more effectively in some countries as opposed to others, and even more interestingly universally growing stronger over time. To quote Steve Silberman from Wired:

In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s. One estimated that the so-called effect size (a measure of statistical significance) in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.

It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.

This, as I am sure you can imagine, is tossing many people into a floozy. Though the implications of this are significant in the research field and drug testing field where corporations have billions at stake. It also poses a many psychological and social questions as well. For example, what kind of changes must occur in the constructs of an environment for an individual (or a large cross section of individuals) to have such significantly different expectations, powerful enough to skew entire intricately orchestrated research efforts.


The consequences stray beyond medicine. Collective expectations of events are the rudder of economic sensibility in a market. People panic as a collective-- the market fails, people display confidence as a collective-- the market thrives. In a certain sense the placebo is more powerful in this setting than anywhere else. Give the people an economic sugar pill, and they will spend their money, gain confidence, and we are all winners.


As you can see the actual mechanism of the placebo effect is a field of great interest and potentially great importance. Tom Lee says, with certain sense of regressive irony:

That’s right: someday soon scientists may be working to develop a pill that can mimic the placebo effect.

So until that day... ill stick with my spoonful of sugar