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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.'"
Would be interesting to see if similar effects could be observed regards acupuncture which is rated to be in the realm of placebo by 'old school' medicine.
CC.
TaijiQuan (Huang, 5 loosenings)
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
There is a war going on for your mind.
The researchers who made the discovery scanned the spinal cords of volunteers while applying painful heat to one arm.
What I want to know is who in their right minds volunteers for this sort of thing? Or are they just all pre-med students and get "volunteered" by their professors?
Cannot find REALITY.SYS. Universe halted.
That sounds like a fun job - you get to burn people, lie right to their face and then publish the results as a scientific breakthrough.
Weren't the ears and eyes of the voluneers also involved? If they hadn't heard the claim, it wouldn't have had the same effect (and did they actually have a control where they rubbed a cream without saying it would diminish pain, perhaps saying it would prevent damage to the skin or perhaps even that it would make it hurt more?). I'd have RTFA except it's behind a paywall.
I have chronic headache and have been a subject in studies. It is well-known that anticipation is an observable component to pain notification and response. To an almost hilarious extent, pain is like gravity in cartoons: if you don't believe it exists, you're less likely to experience it.
captcha: scratchy (they fight...)
Here is the abstract.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Bend over... this won't hurt a bit... I've got some special cream to rub in...
My wife tried a cream. It did nothing for her either.
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!
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> Even so, the cream made spinal-cord neural activity linked to pain vanish.
The cream did no such thing, the people's minds did this. It's quite unsurprising that as the brain processes pain (which is just information about damage to tissue), that the brain can also switch it (the processing, i.e. feeling) off.
I can do this whenever I want. First time I did this when I was 12 or so, and for the umpteenth time the lid of the kettle to boil water for tea fell off, and I burnt my hand. Painful and annoying. I said to myself: Enough, no more pain! And gone it was. Not really anything special I believe, see e.g. fakirs.
Of course the 'placebo effect' is more than just turning off pain, it's also about getting better without medicine, i.e. making your body do things to repair itself. This I also do consciously (i.e. I tell myself that my immune system should work harder to kill the 'intruders' :)) and may be the reason why I'm almost never ill, and when I am, I recover very quickly (I never go to a doctor).
Reminds me of a Married with children episode btw.:
[ Al ] I feel strong!
{ Peggy says something }
[ Al ] I feel weak...
(paraphrasing).
I have a degenerative disease, have had a laminectomy, bone spur removals, and have some messed up disks and nerve damage. I've been in some amount pain for about six years and have run the medicine gauntlet.
From experience, I've been prescribed medicine where the doctor's told me "this is much better than what you are on, it will manage your pain much more effectively". I got all excited, and started taking it. On the first day I was miserable. The second and third days were even worse. After a week I switched back.
I really think that the placebo effect only works for small amounts of pain, or for certain kinds of pain (there are a lot of different types). In my case, I ended up with a spinal implant (kind of like an internal tens unit) and take a small amount of medicine to manage the pain. It still hurts every day, but I get by much better and work a 40 to 50 hour week and raise kids.
... it make's sense that placebo effect exists because the ability to shut on and shut off pain perception is critical to human development.
There is a condition where people feel no pain at all, see this article here of a girl who feels no pain.
http://www.cnn.com/2006/HEALTH/conditions/02/03/btsc.oppenheim/
This is an interesting insight into the functioning of the nervous system in response to expectation. If anything, it shows the error in the phrase, "It's all in the head." The perception of pain, and indeed all neurological processes, are not incorporeal and can be shown to have actual physical mechanisms. More reason to dismiss anti-psychiatry claims such as those espoused by Scientology. Mental illness is physical illness, and while it may sometimes be treated by psychological means, it can also be treated by physical means and there is nothing inherently wrong with that approach.
I don't quite understand your point. We already know that acupuncture works. We also know why it works: it works 100% through the placebo effect. This newly discovered mechanism may or may not apply to acupuncture, but it doesn't really matter; we already know that acupuncture has no specific activity for the condition that is being treated. This new discovery does not change this simple fact, and thus does not require us to re-analize acupuncture.
The results would be exactly the same as earlier tests.
It seems to me like any cream, painkiller or not, would have soothed some pain as the result of a burn. Isn't this a bad test since the spinal cord would exhibit some kind of pain-soothing activity anyway?
I much prefer the pill-based placebo tests.
The placebo effect works because pain is not an aspect of reality; it is created by the body for the brain. Pain is useful and helps with survival, but it is generated by the nerves, not by the knife that cuts the skin. If the biological body is what creates pain, then in some instances, the body can not make it also.
Reason the placebo effect doesn't work for everyone is probably similar to whatever the reason is that the same drug doesn't work with the same effectiveness on each and every individual.
The placebo effect is not at all just about pain - in many cases, it is considerably more powerful than the drugs the Doctor prescribes. A rational medical system would spend considerable resources on studying ways to improve the placebo effect. It is a pretty good bet that exhaustive paper work and hospital green paint is not it.
I took part in a study on depression. After a few days on medication the change was dramatic. Friends remarked on it. At the end of the study I was told I was on a placebo. Couldn't believe it as the changes were so dramatic. Felt it must have been a mistake, and the doctor I told this to accepted my response. It is only years later that I've entertained the thought that yes, maybe it was a placebo. So strange that something that I felt (and I mean that quite literally) had an effect on my brain could be attributed to spinal nerves.
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.
According to this, there's no way to tell whether it was the cream or the brain. The doctors didn't rub cream on anyone without telling them anything and/or rub cream on anyone saying that it contained suspended HCL? Tell people they were rubbing a pain killer powder on their skin? There was no control group? This wasn't a well planned experiment. Just having a soothing balm on the skin might be enough to lower heat pain. Speaking of which: did they try any other types of pain? Heat pain feels quite a bit different from impact pain.
No active ingredient? They did apply a cream. If you've had painful heat applied to your arm, rubbing butter on it will make it feel better; lidocaine would feel MORE better*, but this isn't a sugar pill.
* "Me fail English? That's unpossible!"
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$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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First off, acupuncture has be double blind studied. It has no effect above a placebo*. The is standard medical testing. If it doesn't have an effect above a placebo, it's not considered medical effective.
Second, Acupuncture relies on mystic belief, not actual knowledge of how the body works.
Third, A placebo effect doesn't cure ANYTHING. It may make you feel better. It's important to know that before spending money on it. In fact, getting a gentle back rub from a loved one has the same effect, and it's cheaper, and it's time with someone who cares about you.
Forth, 'Old school medicine' it a logical fallacy just like saying 'Chinese** medicine' or 'western medicine'. Those term where created to pose a false dichotomy from people who have no evidence on there side.
There is only medicine. It works, or it doesn't work.
*There are many types of placebo effects.
** It really should be called Mao medicine. Much of what people consider Chinese medicine was forced onto the population by Mao with no scientific backing.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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Here is a link to a review of the study, it will clear up most things peopel seemed confused about
http://www.theness.com/neurologicablog/?p=1130#more-1130
Here is a nice article on what a placebo effect is, may people here don't seem to understand the term.
http://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/?p=1248
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
the spinal cord is involved in the placebo effect
Let's see... they're basically studying the way the of the brain perceives pain inflicted on the body. The spinal cord links the brain to the body. Now we have this astonishing discovery that the spinal cord is involved in this process. I am truly humbled by such revelations.
When I was 15, I had a bicycle wreck where I received major road-rash on my entire left side. Unable to tolerate the pain that evening enough to sleep, I went to the emergency room, where I was given codeine. That helped a lot. The next morning, I had to take a shower. Expecting that to hurt a lot, I, for some reason, decided to see if I could "shut off" the pain while exposing the road-rash to the running water. Somehow I did some mental twist that completely shut off the pain. My interpretation/guess at the time was that the codeine taught my brain a technique to shut off the pain. This would be interesting if true. I've been able to repeat this several times since then, but not with headaches. Took neural anatomy years later, where I found out that facial nerves don't come from the spine. I also found out that the spine itself has controllers that control muscles. The brain controls those controllers. My interpretation/guess is that I need the spinal controllers to control pain, and I don't have those for facial (sinus?) pain. I'm uncomfortable calling this "placebo" effect. Seems like its something else. But maybe that's because here I have a mechanism, and I prefer to label only the mysterious as "placebo".
I wonder if credulous people exhibit a stronger placebo effect. I worry that the increase in the placebo effect is a measure of more credulous population.
Would be interesting to hear how this observed mechanism compares to the Gate Control Theory of Pain Control, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gate_control_theory_of_pain
If this is the same mechanism, then treatment modalities from acupuncture to TENS to etc. might be better evaluated and explained.
Correct of course; For any result that needs to be verified, there is a scientist out there bad enough to design an experiment which can fail to test it for any possible reason.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Articles like this are irresponsible and just lead to further placebo abuse. I've been hooked on placebos for years and this just makes me cringe.
After I've been told over and over Windows 7 is faster, it really is. Free from pain at last!
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