Slashdot Mirror
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.
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...)
Never applied for one, but I think this is probably the result of the "get paid for medical testing" ads you see in the back of free circulars in & around college towns.
p.s. Why the hell is this marked Troll?
There is a war going on for your mind.
Bend over... this won't hurt a bit... I've got some special cream to rub in...
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!
Dislike the Electoral College? Lobby your state to join the National Popular Vote Interstate Compact.
> 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/
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.
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.
The perception of pain, and indeed all neurological processes, are not incorporeal and can be shown to have actual physical mechanisms.
Three hundred and fifty years after Willis et al showed that the brain was the physical seat of perception, it is incredible that the mythology of "mind over matter" is even coherent to anyone anymore: mind is matter. Why anyone believes otherwise is a mystery.
Yet we still see people in response to this article saying "the placebo effect isn't an effect", as if the physiological response that results in an altered state of belief isn't real because they believe for some reason that psychological states aren't real. The placebo effect is a perfectly ordinary physiological effect, as all psychological effects are. That we can access our physiology via words, ideas and beliefs is no great suprise, since those words, ideas as beliefs are generated by our physiology as well.
I guess maybe most people are simply too dim to understand the concept of a system that can act as both a creator/transmitter of beliefs and a reciever/responder to beliefs, although given their own hands, for example, act both as input and output devices makes that a little hard to credit.
It would be extremely interesting to know exactly where the failure of reasoning occurs in people who believe that mind and matter are independent and unrelated things, and the mind is somehow "less real" than the matter that constitutes it.
Blasphemy is a human right. Blasphemophobia kills.
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!"
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
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".