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    Home > Medical News > Medical World News > Nature sub-journal: How powerful is the placebo effect?

    Nature sub-journal: How powerful is the placebo effect?

    • Last Update: 2020-08-23
    • Source: Internet
    • Author: User
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    For more than a century, randomized placebo-controlled clinical trials have been considered gold standards for testing potential new drugs.
    However, the "placebo effect" is also one of the most interesting things that can often be observed: symptoms improve when patients "believe they are being treated effectively" when they receive drugs or "fake" interventions that do not contain active ingredients but are not aware of them.
    , the placebo effect sometimes persists even if the patient knows they are receiving a placebo.
    , in this case, will it be the subject who deliberately said "good words"? A new study published in Nature Communications provides evidence that placebos do cause physiological effects through psychological factors.
    : Nature Communications The study was led by researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Michigan.
    To explore whether non-deceptive placebos,i.e. people knew they were receiving a placebo, the researchers conducted two parallel experiments that tested the effectiveness of non-deceptive placebos in improving mood and brain activity using subjective feelings and objective physiological indicators.
    two experiments, the researchers showed two separate groups of subjects a series of images, including images that could cause negative emotions and neutrality, with slightly different playback sequences and the time between each picture playing.
    1 included 68 subjects who were asked to give back their psychological feelings with a score of 1-9 after viewing each picture.
    218 members, the researchers measured mood-related brainwave activity throughout the picture.
    the two experiments, the subjects were divided into two groups.
    all members inhaled the nasal spray of the salt solution prepared by the researchers at the same time.
    , the first group members were explicitly informed that it was a placebo and did not contain any active ingredients, but if they thought it was useful, it might help relieve discomfort.
    the second group were told that the spray improved physiological indicators.
    results showed that, in Experiment 1, non-deceptive placebos significantly reduced the self-reported emotional distress of subjects when negative images were shown.
    and played a neutral picture, the emotional feedback of the two groups of subjects was similar.
    1, non-deceptive placebos significantly reduced the participants' self-reported emotional distress when viewing negative images.
    (Image Source: Resources) In Experiment 2, both negative and neutral images caused significant fluctuations in the subjects' brain waves.
    , however, when the images appeared, the non-deceptive placebo significantly reduced the subjects' brainwave activity associated with negative emotions.
    in lab 2, subjects in the non-deceptive placebo group were generally milder (b) associated with negative emotions, and during the 5000ms played in a single image, the brainwaves fluctuated more often (c-red for large fluctuations and blue for small fluctuations).
    "These findings provide initial support, and the non-deceptive placebo not only reflects the bias of the response - that is, promotes the subjects to express the effects that researchers want to hear, but also has a real psychobiological effect," said Dr. Ethan Kross, a psychology professor at the University of Michigan and one of the authors. the
    researchers suggest that this non-deceptive placebo effect also has the potential to be applied in conventional clinical practice, with a good placebo "heart-to-heart" effect that, in some exceptional cases, can help patients without opening a drug.
    ", imagine that taking two sugar pills a day with no side effects (and no active ingredients) can relieve stress if you are told of the effective effects of a placebo.
    , a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Michigan and author of the study, said, "These results make this scenario more likely."
    "Source: Pixabay References: Guevarra, D.A., et al., (2020). Placebos without contact reduce self-report and neural measures of the emotional distress. Nat Commun, DOI: Placebos prove reality when even people know they're taking one. Retrieved August 7, 2020, from Note: This article is intended to introduce advances in medical health research and is not recommended for treatment options.
    if you need guidance on treatment options, go to a regular hospital.
    title: Nature sub-issue: How strong is the placebo effect? Experiments have shown that knowing it's a placebo actually worked...
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