Page 64 - Time Special Edition Alternative Medicine (January 2020)

The Magic
of Placebo
Scientists have found a complex world in the lowly
sugar pill that challenges what we know about psychology
and physiology as well as how we practice medicine
BY DAVID BJERKLIE
the studies hardly seem a shining example
of medicine’s healing grace. Patients suffering pain,
depression and even Parkinson’s disease are treated
with sugar pills, saline injections or sham surgery.
Irritable-bowel sufferers are given fake acupunc-
ture. Women with polycystic ovarian syndrome, a
common cause of infertility, are prescribed bogus
remedies. But these “treatments” aren’t the latest
outrages of medical malfeasance. In fact, the sub-
jects felt better, coped better, moved better, expe-
rienced fewer symptoms, even conceived better.
What in the name of Hippocrates is going on here?
You have just entered the fun-house world of
placebos. The supervised deceptions listed above
are actually scrupulously conducted research tri-
als designed to investigate the healing power of the
mind. Traditionally, the accepted role of placebos
is to serve as inactive controls in randomized clini-
cal studies, the baseline yardstick by which scien-
tific objectivity is sought and results are measured.
But increasingly, placebos are also the rising stars
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of their own branch of research, one that seeks to
understand the power of potions and procedures
that, by all rights, should be completely ineffectual.
For generations, caregivers doled out versions of
the classic placebo—an inert sugar or starch pill—as
a passive token of hope and compassion. It was of-
fered to patients who desperately wanted some sort
of treatment when none was available or called for.
These days, placebos may be vitamins rather than
sugar pills, but their purpose is the same. Even a
bona fide medicine can be a placebo if it is offered
in minute doses or for conditions that aren’t likely
to respond to it. And the practice is more common
than most patients might suspect: a recent survey
of U.S. internists and rheumatologists found that
some 50% regularly prescribe placebos.
The use of placebos is widespread for good rea-
son. As it turns out, placebos are “much more pow-
erful” than previously imagined, according to Fab-
rizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy.
Not only is the placebo effect real, says Benedetti,