The placebo effect refers to when a person experiences improvement in their health because they believe they are receiving treatment, even though they aren’t. When someone expects to feel better, their mind can sometimes release endorphins. This is what causes relief of pain, which is often mistaken for results. Henry K. Beecher, the inventor of the term placebo effect, conducted many clinical studies where patients received faked medication, likely a sugar pill, and yet 35% of people improved simply because they believed they would (PubMed).
According to the Better Health Channel, main factors to the placebo effect are expectation, conditioning, brain chemistry, environment, and perception. To start off, as mentioned earlier, if someone expects results, the brain can sometimes change how you feel. Secondly, conditioning (learned responses) comes from previously being medicated. If someone has taken medication various times before, their bodies and brains learn that when medication is consumed, the person should feel better. This is similar to expectations in how the brain can make the person improve. Similar to the last two, the brain is able to release chemicals. Endorphins (natural painkillers) were mentioned earlier, but dopamine is also released, which is linked to feeling better. Next, the environment plays a major part in the placebo effect. Especially in somewhere like a hospital or even in bed, if your mind recognizes your environment as a place of treatment and recovery, it adds to that expectation which can lead to improvement. Melissa Aytug (10) recalls how “when I got really sick randomly, I went to urgent care. While waiting for results, even though I had not been medicated yet, I already started feeling a lot better because I was in a hospital setting.” Lastly, perception is probably the most common one. Perception refers to when someone thinks they are being treated, so they pay less attention to symptoms and feel less intense. In reality, symptoms may not be changing whatsoever, but simply being distracted helps. Even with all this information, there is no real pinpointed cause for this. Some people experience it, and others don’t. The most accurate cause is individual to everybody’s brain.
Interestingly enough, the effects can be either permanent or temporary. Depending on the severity of the sickness, these endorphins that the brain releases can sometimes be enough to subside symptoms. Holly Keitel (10) commented that she “had a migraine and completely thought I took tylenol and within an hour felt much better, even though it turned out I didn’t.” However, these symptoms can also return as the person is not actually being medicated. If this occurs, the person may feel frustration as to why the medication is not working and feel worse overall.
In short, the placebo effect is a real and common thing. The easiest way to avoid the placebo effect is to double check medication you are consuming and make sure it is the correct one. Even then, the placebo effect is not dangerous, especially if it provides real results, but it demonstrates the complexity and capability of the human brain.
