Half Of A Drug's Power Comes From Thinking It Will Work : Shots - Health News : NPR

When you take a pill, you and your doctor hope it will work — and that helps it work.That's not a new idea. But now researchers say they know just how much of a drug's effect comes from the patient's expectation: at least half.When patients in the midst of a migraine attack took a dummy pill they thought was a widely used migraine drug, it reduced their pain roughly as much as when they took the real drug thinking it was a placebo."There was no difference between the pharmacology of the drug in reducing pain and the placebo dressed up with a nice word," study author Ted Kaptchuk tells Shots. "Basically we show that words can actually double the effect of a drug. That's pretty impressive."And if it works when treating migraine headaches, it also might work for a wide variety of other ailments, from asthma to intestinal cramps to back pain, that involve the subjective experience of symptoms.The findings, in this week's Science Translational Medicine, have interesting implications for doctors and patients, because what physicians say about a medication appears to have a lot to do with its benefits.Beyond that, it raises a question of whether drug companies should take subjects' expectations into account when they test a new drug. (That question may explain why drug-maker Merck helped fund the study, along with the National Institutes of Health.)The study is the latest in a series that's helping to decipher the mysteries of the placebo effect. The resea...
Source: Psychology of Pain - Category: Psychiatrists and Psychologists Source Type: blogs