Creating Optimism

Even when people know they’re dummy pills.

According to a 2008 report in the British Medical Journal 50% of physicians in the US have prescribed placebos to their patients without telling them that they were just dumb pills. They do this for a variety of reasons— for example when the regular treatments might not be working, or there was no known treatment available.

This statistic encouraged Harvard Medical School professor Ted Kaptchuk to conduct a study to see if placebos worked on patients even when they were told that they were getting a sugar pill with no active ingredients. “Everyone around me thought I was nuts,” he told the journal Monitor on Psychology.

Kaptchuk and his researchers recruited 80 people with treatment resistant IBS. They divided them into two groups and gave one group the placebos and gave no treatment to the others. The ones taking the dummy pills were told that the medicine was fake, but that they had to take the pills twice a day without fail. The word “placebo” was also printed on the medicine bottles.

Over three weeks the researchers monitored the participants reported symptoms. What they found was really remarkable: 59% of those who had taken the placebos reported getting relief. They now assume that the sugar pills work because the ritual of taking them stimulates the body to produce pain-relieving endorphins.

“Our results challenge the conventional wisdom that placebo effects require intentional ignorance,” Kaptchuk says. His findings were published in the journal Public Library of Science ONE.

These findings reinforce the studies on a number of medicines—including antidepressants—that show that they work because of the placebo effect. Ever since the famous Connecticut University study of 1999 it has been known that the efficacy of an antidepressant depends very largely on the strength of the relationship between the patient and the prescribing physician. This point was reinforced by the Hull University metastudy published in 2008.