The Placebo Effect

Day 142 / 365

Mens sana in corpore sano

The above is a Latin phrase. It translates to “A healthy mind in a healthy body”, the idea being that maintaining good physical health is important if you want to healthy and stress-free brain.

But you would often find that the converse is true as well. If you are stressed, if you are constantly thinking that you are not well, your body would more often then not respond by actually falling ill. You can think yourself into bad health.

The placebo effect explains how people can sometimes think themselves out of an illness as well.

What’s a placebo?

A placebo is a medicine or a treatment that actually does nothing, but it’s presented to the patient as if it’s real medicine. Often this ‘fake’ medicine produces real physical effects on the patient, and that’s known as the placebo effect. The patient gets better not because of the placebo, but because he is taking what he thinks is real medicine and therefore he thinks it is going to work.

Importance of placebo in clinical trials

Any new medicine has to go through trials before it can be approved for public use. In these trials, a group of people is given the medicine and they are monitored to see if it has any effect.

Now we can’t be sure that any effect we see is due to the medicine working, or because of the placebo effect. This is why the trials have a separate group of people who are given a placebo that looks identical to the medicine but has no effect. If the medicine performs better than the placebo, that would indicate that it is actually effective.

This post is part of my 365 Day Project for 2019. Read about it here

Yesterday’s blog —The Peter Principle