Placebo Effect Caught In the Act In Spinal Nerves

SerpensV passes along the news that German scientists have found direct evidence that the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect (whose diminishing over time we discussed a bit earlier). "The researchers who made the discovery scanned the spinal cords of volunteers while applying painful heat to one arm. Then they rubbed a cream onto the arm and told the volunteers that it contained a painkiller, but in fact it had no active ingredient. Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish. 'This type of mechanism has been envisioned for over 40 years for placebo analgesia,' says Donald Price, a neuroscientist at the University of Florida in Gainesville, who was not involved in the new study. 'This study provides the most direct test of this mechanism to date.'"

Comments

Not diminishing.

[Jaysyn]

The placebo effect isn't getting weaker, it's getting more effective. The /. article linked even states that. It the reason why if prozac was a new drug today it more than likely would have been rejected by the FDA.

Also see these Wired & TechDirt articles.

http://www.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect?currentPage=all

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20090827/0212446014.shtml

Three cheers for kdawson

[AdmiralXyz]

I gotta say, posting a link claiming the placebo effect is "diminishing over time" when that link is to a Slashdot article saying precisely the opposite is a new low.

Hell, you don't even have to click on the link: you can see what it actually says just by reading the URL!