Informative Speech On Placebo Effect

Introduction-

The placebo effect has been one of the most interesting but irritating topics within biomedical science for over the past 60 years. Through this speech I wish to inform and educate while I discuss the placebo effect and cover what it is, how it works and why that is.

What:

What is the placebo effect?

What if you found out the medicine your doctor has been giving you wasn’t proven to make you feel any better but you did get better. This is the placebo effect.

The placebo effect according to Shapiro, is ‘The nonspecific psychological or physiological therapeutic effect produced by a placebo or the effect of spontaneous improvement attributed to the placebo treatment’ (Shapiro, 1968, cited in Harrington, 1997)

This means that the

placebo effect is any therapy given either knowingly or unknowingly to the practitioner to administer to patients to heal a condition without having any therapeutic effects. The treatments are to improve the condition of the patient through no physical or chemical impact directly.
Placebos aren’t just pills, they can be creams, injections, surgeries or drinks.

You can even get placebo buttons, they don’t actually do anything but they make you feel as if you are in control (close door buttons in lifts and walk buttons on busy intersections)

How/why:

When we are sick it is actually not in our best interest to cure ourselves immediately. Symptoms we call illnesses such as headache, fever or nausea are actually defences which we put up against illness.

We don’t want to undermine these defences or loose pain because in fact these defences are protecting us from further injury or infection. Why would we want to stop feeling sick when our bodies are full of toxins?

Let’s create an example-

You fall over and badly graze your knee.

It hurts and you start to cry, you sit there and wait for

help.
This is a very adaptive response. The pain is bringing benefits it is going to stop you making things worse like opening up the wound.
It’s also a very costly thing to do, if that pain continues for too long you are not going to be able to get on with your life, you are not going to be able to feed yourself, and you would not be able to run away from a predator.
Your mother comes to the rescue, picks you up and kisses you better.

Now you feel safe and you don’t actually need to feel the pain to the extent you did when protecting yourself. Because you are now protected by your mother.

The effect is that the sudden benefit of the pain has been reduced, its no longer central anymore as your mother has allowed you to readjust the equation and now the benefit of the pain goes down and the cost of the pain exceeds the benefit and so pain reduces.

So why does this occur?

This occurs because when you are in this sense of fake security you are releasing endogenous opiates which are our body’s natural pain killers.

So when you replace your mother with a placebo you are still going to release the same set of chemicals, this can also be related to taking drugs and relacing that with a placebo too.

Why:

Placebos are not about what’s in it, it’s about the beliefs we load on to it, our minds create the medicine.

So why is the placebo effect so powerful?

We think about 60-70,000 thoughts in one day, 90 percent of those thoughts are linked with the day before so those thoughts will always lead to the same choices and those same choices will always create those same

behaviours.
Those behaviours will have the same experiences and the same experiences will always create the same emotions. And those very emotions will drive the very same thoughts.
This is called a personality.
So if you keep doing the same things every single day there no new information coming from the environment to begin to signal any new gene in any new way.
But is you change it with a new thought, a new choice in your behaviour, a new experience or a new emotion. Once change takes place there will be physical and chemical changes that will begin to take place in the brain, in the body and in the gene.
So when we talk about the placebo response in people who heal themselves we come to the conclusion that we can’t consciously do that.
When people combined a clear intention with an elevated emotion you move into a new state of being and that is what begins the program the autonomic nervous system. The autonomic nervous system begins to make the very chemicals to match you intentions aka endogenous opiates.
I’m not say that the one and only cause of the placebo effect is due to our thoughts, but it is basically the underlying reasons for many other theories such as: visual appeal where the size, shape, colour or even cost determines the effectiveness of the placebo.
Conclusion:
It seems that we still have a lot to learn about a patients mind and body when it comes to the placebo effect. We can conclude though that there is a very strong link to the power of thought and the positive effects of placebos. That by changing the way we think, we can actually cure ourselves of these so called life threatening illness. In the honest sense placebos provide a dose of contrived optimism.