Study: The placebo effect works even when people know they are taking a placebo

Placebos Prove Powerful, Even When People Know They’re Taking One, New Study Suggests (MSU release): How much of a treatment is mind over matter? It is well documented that people often feel better after taking a treatment without active ingredients simply because they believe it’s real — known as the placebo effect. A team of researchers from Michigan State University, University of Michigan and Dartmouth College is the first to demonstrate that placebos reduce brain markers of emotional distress even when people know they are taking one. “Just think: What if someone took a side-effect free sugar pill twice a day after going through a short convincing video on the power of placebos and experienced reduced stress as a result?”, said Darwin Guevarra, MSU postdoctoral fellow and the study’s lead author. “These results raise that possibility” … Our paper on placebos without deception is out in @NatureComms. In this paper, coauthored with Jason Moser, @TorWager, and Ethan Kross, we found that placebos without deception reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress. Article Link: https://t.co/KFEMdcjMIB — GuevarraDarwin (@GuevarraDarwin) July 30, 2020 To test nondeceptive placebos, the researchers showed two separate groups of people a series of emotional images across two experiments. The nondeceptive placebo group members read about placebo effects and were asked to inhale a saline solution nasal spray. They were told that the nasal spray was...
Source: SharpBrains - Category: Neuroscience Authors: Tags: Cognitive Neuroscience Health & Wellness active ingredient clinical disorders neural neural measure neuroplasticity non-deceptive non-deceptive placebos Placebo-Effect psychobiological sugar-pill Source Type: blogs