Speaker 1: Welcome to brain stuff. From how stuff works, everybody, I'm
Speaker 1: Christian Seger, and this is brain stuff. You have surely
Speaker 1: heard of placebos, their phony drugs that real drugs are
Speaker 1: tested against. But have you ever wondered how someone could
Speaker 1: be fooled into thinking they've received a powerful chemical compound
Speaker 1: when all they've been given is in a inert sugar pill. Well,
Speaker 1: fortunately some researchers have wondered too, and they've come up
Speaker 1: with some really astounding answers. Placebo actually means I will
Speaker 1: please in Latin, and they take their name from mourners
Speaker 1: who are hired to be sad at funerals. Back in
Speaker 1: medieval times, the mourners were fake in the term eventually
Speaker 1: came to be applied to fake drugs. As many as
Speaker 1: half of all physicians admit to having used placebos in
Speaker 1: their general practices, usually in the form of vitamins. Back
Speaker 1: in the day, physicians used placebos when they had no
Speaker 1: other avenues of treatment available. They had nothing to lose,
Speaker 1: and neither did the patients, so you know who cared.
Speaker 1: Placebos became a standard component of the double blind study,
Speaker 1: where participants are split into groups that either get the
Speaker 1: drug or get the placebo. The logic there is that
Speaker 1: if the real drug elicits a stronger response than the
Speaker 1: fake drug, you know, the placebo, then it's proven successful.
Speaker 1: Bingo it works. The thing is, some researchers noticed that
Speaker 1: a lot of people in the double blind studies who
Speaker 1: received placebos still had positive reactions to them. As many
Speaker 1: as one third of all people respond favorably to placebos.
Speaker 1: And let's recap here. Sick people are given fake drugs
Speaker 1: like a sugar pill, and then they get better as
Speaker 1: a result. This is not supposed to happen, so studies
Speaker 1: were launched to find out what was going on. One
Speaker 1: two thousand four study in Michigan gave participants a painful
Speaker 1: but harmless injection in their jaws. Then they were given
Speaker 1: a saline injection they were told was a pain reliever.
Speaker 1: Saline has no pain relieving properties, hence it was a
Speaker 1: placebo injection. Astoundingly, the researchers found that the pain levels
Speaker 1: went down in everyone in the study following this injection.
Speaker 1: When viewed through a PET scan, the researchers found the
Speaker 1: participants brains had released endorphins, the body's natural painkillers, So
Speaker 1: a fake injection elicited a genuine biological response because of
Speaker 1: the placebo. The people's pain decreased, not just in their minds,
Speaker 1: but in actuality. And it's not just saline injections and
Speaker 1: sugar pills that can elicit a placebo effect. What conventional
Speaker 1: medicine considers sham treatments like say acupuncture, have been shown
Speaker 1: to at least produce a placebo effect, and even sham
Speaker 1: sham treatments can to like for instance, in tests of
Speaker 1: acupuncture that use retractable needles. Even more sounding is the
Speaker 1: no sebo effect. Not only can fake drugs and treatments
Speaker 1: produce a positive response, people can suffer from negative side
Speaker 1: effects from placebo's two. So what is going on here? Well,
Speaker 1: researchers explanations typically fall into two camps. The subject expectancy
Speaker 1: effect where people know what the outcome should be and
Speaker 1: unconsciously conform to that expected outcome, and classical conditioning like
Speaker 1: Pavlov's dogs, but instead of salivating at a bell, we
Speaker 1: experience relief through what we think is a drug. The jury, however,
Speaker 1: is still out on what exactly is behind the placebo effect. Ethically,
Speaker 1: there's a wrestling match going on. On one hand, the
Speaker 1: idea that people can heal through the power of their
Speaker 1: own bodies rather than through powerful drugs that often have
Speaker 1: undesirable side effects. Well, it's a good thing. On the
Speaker 1: other informing patients truthfully is a tenet of modern medicine,
Speaker 1: and placebo's require pretty much outright lying by doctors. So
Speaker 1: what to do. Some clever physicians have figured out a loophole.
Speaker 1: They can offer a placebo as a cure to a patient,
Speaker 1: but tell them they're not sure how the drug works.
Speaker 1: All that's missing is the wink and the nudge. Check
Speaker 1: out the brain stuff channel on YouTube, and for more
Speaker 1: on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com.