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Title : The Power of Placebo Goes Beyond The Mind
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The Power of Placebo Goes Beyond The Mind

For years, scientists have observed the placebo effect only as a figment of overactive patients. Of course, the fake drugs appeared to stop epileptic seizures, lower blood pressure, relieve migraines and soften sudden movements in Parkinson's - but these people were not really better. . Or so scientists thought

Much of medicine is based on what is considered the strongest possible evidence: The placebo-controlled trial. An article in the October 19 Annals of Internal Medicine - entitled "What's in Placebos: Who knows?" calls into question the basis on which rests much of the medicine, which shows that there is no standard behind the standard -. no standard for placebo

Now, the use of PET scans and MRI to look at the heads of patients who respond to sugar pills, researchers have found that the placebo effect is not "all in the head of patients", but rather, in their brains. New research shows that belief in a dummy treatment leads to changes in brain chemistry.

"There have always been people who have said we could do better ourselves by positive thinking," says Dr.

Michael Selzer, a professor of neurology at the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. "After neglecting this for years, here are studies showing that our thoughts can actually interact with the brain in a physical way." New knowledge about how they work placebos can even help scientists determine how to optimize the effect and teach people to form their own brain to help with healing.

Mind over brain matter

Recent reports show that the anticipation of relief from a placebo can lead to an easing of pain real, when the brain makes its own opiates for pain-dousing. Brain scans of patients with Parkinson show increases of a chemical messenger called dopamine, which leads to an improvement in symptoms when patients think - mistakenly -. they are receiving real therapy

And studies in depressed patients as the Park have found that almost the same number are helped by treatments with placebo and current medications. In fact, as a result, a person's response to treatment with placebo can offer clues to whether the "real" treatment with antidepressants are likely to work.

Researchers are beginning to appreciate the power that the mind can have on the body, says Tor Wager, an assistant professor of psychology at Columbia University.

"One idea that emerges at this point is that belief in a placebo fed by processes in the brain that produce physical results that really shape how your body responds to things," he says. "The brain has much more control over the body than can exercise voluntarily."

As an example of this, Wager points to the body's response to perceived threats.

"They say it's late at night and everything is quiet and you suddenly see someone outside, near a window," he explains. "Your body begins to respond. His pupils are dilated. Your heart rate increases. You start to sweat."

The belief that something is threatening there produces a lot of physical responses that it has little control. If you were told to calm down and disable these feelings, I could not, says Wager. "But if the belief changes - say, it is only her husband returns home. - Changes in physical response"

The question now is how to harness these powerful responses, unconscious, says Wager.

Brain waves may hold the key

The University of California, Los Angeles, volunteers treated with placebo were connected to an electroencephalogram (EEG), a device that records the electrical activity of the brain. After a week of sugar pills, the volunteers were given either placebos or more real antidepressant. They were not told what kind of pill they received.

Eight weeks later, the researchers examined the brain waves recorded by EEG behind when all the volunteers were taking placebos. UCLA scientists discovered something intriguing :. People who received the greatest benefit from current medication had a specific pattern of brain waves when they were being treated with placebo

These results are described in a study published this month in the American Journal of Psychiatry. Researchers have not yet discovered what the specific pattern of brain waves means, but the study does show how patients can be economically selected with an EEG to show the doctors who are more likely to respond to antidepressant medications, says author Aimee M main report. Hunter, a research associate at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA.

teach patients to relieve themselves

Meanwhile, at Stanford University, scientists thought that there must be a way to harness the placebo response to help soothe their own pain patients.

Researchers improvised an MRI so that people could see real-time images of their brains, while lying in the scanner. The idea was to use the images to teach study volunteers to consciously pumping activity in parts of the brain activated by the placebo effect, says Dr. Sean Mackey, associate director of the division of pain management at Stanford and director of the neuroimaging laboratory and pain.

One of those volunteers, Laura Tibbitts, were enrolled in the study with the hope that she might be able to find a way to calm the constant and permanent pain that descended after his shoulder and right arm were destroyed in a riding accident eight years earlier.

"Pain is not in muscles or arm that can be hurt," says Mackey. "The pain is in your brain."

A signal starts at an injured site and travels to the brain, says Mackey. But, until the brain interprets the electrical signal, it is not really "feel" the pain.

Part of what happens in the interpretation that the brain is the expectation, says Mackey. "I think in the placebo response, at least in part, as a manipulation of hope. And maybe changing hope and meets the placebo response that might be able to ultimately find a way to provide prolonged therapy chronic pain. "

reclining on the scanner to see pictures of your brain, you Tibbitts said to evoke memories of pain on the day of the accident. Later, he was instructed to think calming thoughts. "I imagined people small shovel away the pain, trying to rescue," says the 32-year-old resident of San Francisco. "Or I am thinking of water or snowflakes extinguish the fire."

experiment Train

Through trial and error, Tibbitts determined what kind of thoughts shot and rejected the brain regions that Mackey said were linked to their pain. Mental images had an impact.

And the control over newly discovered levels are empowered pain, Tibbitts said.

"I think the most amazing thing was to see that the exploration of my brain constantly causing pain," he adds. "And after really gain control over the pain, did not have that power - even when I was doing feel worse. - It was amazing to me"

Linda Carroll is a health writer and science who live in New Jersey. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Newsday, Health magazine and Smart Money.
Source: PreventDisease

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