Placebo Effect Essay

Of all the ways that expectation can influence how we interpret an experience, one of the more well documented and strangest examples is the placebo effect. The placebo effect is responsible for the popularity of ineffective “snake-oil” like treatments, that claim to treat things like pain, depression, and other disorders and symptoms. Many of these treatments were never rigorously tested, and some don’t even contain the product that they claim to have, yet they have multitudes of loyal buyers, who will swear up and down that they feel the effects instantly. Merely the belief that a medication, or some other form of treatment, will relieve them of their symptoms is enough to make those medications effective.
A placebo is an inactive substance,

If the control group wasn’t given a pill as well, all participants, as well as the experimenters, would automatically know which condition they were in, and that would influence their results. Therefore, inactive substances that were identical to the drug being tested were given to some of the participants, making single-blind and double-blind studies possible. However, this same expectation that they were trying to avoid occurred when they gave participants placebos. Just by being given a pill and told that it would treat their symptoms, participants would report an improvement in their

Comparisions of PET scans between placebo recipients and fluoxetine showed metabolic increases in the prefrontal cortex, premotor cortex, anterior cingulate, parietal, posterior insula, and posterior cingulate, and decreases in the subgenual cingulate, para-hippocampus, and thalamus in both groups. The fluoxetine group additionally had increases in the brain stem and decreases in the striatum, hippocampus, and anterior insula, and overall showed a greater magnitude of changes compared to the placebo group (Mayberg et al, 2002). This study indicated that while placebo effects might appear to be the same, additional changes to the brain from the antidepressant appear to have a more lasting effect and be more effective in the long