The Placebo Effect

The mind is a powerful tool. It can be used to heal or harm the body. The body does not have to be physically treated with medicines and treatment, or be physically harmed because the mental power of the mind can make physical changes within the body on its own. The placebo effect is a beneficial effect that can make physical changes inside of the body solely based on the power of the mind and the belief that you are going to get better. The adverse effect that also uses the strength of the mind is the nocebo effect. The nocebo effect is just the same as the placebo effect except that it generates the opposite results of the placebo effect and harms the body.

A placebo is a material substance or treatment that isn’t really a treatment at all. Placebos seem like any other medicine or treatment because they look like other treatments, but in reality, it is not medicine at all and contains no medicinal benefits. Placebo’s come in many forms, just like usual treatments placebos can be a pill, an injection, an inhaler, a liquid, or a procedure. Placebo’s, however, unlike treatments do not have any affect on the illness. It is really the power of the mind and what you believe the placebo will do for you.

What the placebo effect is, is the placebo actually working in the the person to fight an illness just as a real treatment would. A placebo may not destroy the illness completely, but it known to lessen its affects. Scientists still do not know too much about how or why the placebo effect works, but they have conducted studies to show that shortly after patients are “treated” with placebos, there is increased brain activity and an increase in endorphins which are the bodies natural pain killers (Harvard Medical, 2012).

When you exp...

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...at women who thought that they were going to get heart disease were four times as likely to die, compared to women who didn’t believe that they were going to die from the disease. These women being tested had similar physical attributes and were of similar age (Reid, 2002). This test proves that if you believe you are going to get sick, or even die, it is more likely to happen.

The placebo and nocebo effect have not been studied thoroughly enough for scientists to fully understand what is going on inside the body when these effects are occurring. There is still so much to learn about the ability of the mind and its physical effects on the body. But it is certain that the placebo effect is the physical positive outcome of a a mentally positive state of mind, and the nocebo effect is just the opposite: a negative state of mind resulting in negative physical effects.