The Placebo Effect: Mind Over Matter

The mind can hold tremendous power over our bodies. People walking over burning coal with no sign of pain, seemingly average people achieving feats of superhuman strength, or even just the everyday person overcoming tremendous adversity. We've all heard the stories. This influence of the mind is often undermined and even brushed aside as wishful thinking. But how far can the power of the mind really go? How much can you really do simply with belief?

Could you, for example, get rid of a headache just by thinking it off? Could you get fitter by just believing you exercised? How about reducing the symptoms of a disease without a cure? These things might sound too good to be true, but hear me out. There's actually a whole field of scientific empirical research out there dedicated to this exact phenomena. I'm talking about the placebo effect.

It's generally understood as an effect where your mind tricks you into believing that a not-so-real treatment has real therapeutic results. People seem to experience a benefit after taking a look-alike pill or drug that has no active ingredients in it. Sometimes the placebo effect can be induced by words alone. All this should have no medical effect on the patient, and yet it does.

There are different kinds of placebos too: pills, drinks, injections. Interestingly, some of these placebos are more effective than others, but I'll get to that later. In most cases, people receiving placebos believe they're getting a real medical treatment. For example, in a clinical trial for COVID-19 prevention, a medical team chose a vitamin C supplement as the placebo. It was chosen as such because there's a widely held view that vitamin C supplements help prevent the common cold and diseases like COVID-19, even though there's almost no evidence to prove that that's really the case.

In this instance, the general perception was enough to essentially hide the pills as placebos, whilst the rest of the medicines were actual treatments. Remarkably, however, in certain scenarios, placebos tend to work even when the patients receiving them know that it's only a sugar pill. Regardless, for the majority of the history of the placebo effect, deception has played a key role.

In fact, the name placebo originates from the term placebo singers—people who, according to French custom, would show up at funerals. They almost never had anything to do with the deceased and would only show up for a share of the funeral food and drinks—funeral crashers, if you will. And they wouldn't just show up; they would express great sadness and despair at the loss of the deceased, you know, to complete the act.

This fake act to please is what the term placebo stood for for a long, long time before finally being introduced in the medical vernacular. The placebo effect is now common in the gold standard of rigorous medicinal practices. So how did this act of deception make its way to medical practice?

Well, as with all good inventions, it started off with doubt. In the 1770s, John Hagarth, a British physician, was curious about the efficacy of Perkins rods. These were pointy metal rods that were supposed to draw out rheumatic fever and gout. Other than being absolute crap, this treatment was also expensive.

Funny enough, Hagarth’s doubt seemed to have been born out of a suspicion for the price rather than the ridiculousness of the procedure, which, to be fair, wasn't all that ridiculous back in those days anyway. But regardless, it was still enough for him to contest that similar results could be achieved using much cheaper rods. To prove his point, he used wooden rods instead of metal ones and reported that four out of the five patients saw improvements.

Thus, the placebo effect was formally observed for the first time. From there, scientists wondered what could have caused such a medicine-like effect in fake look-alikes, which shed light on the mechanisms of the body that the placebo effect relies upon. Here, the most prominent theory seems to be the idea that there is, and always has been, a correlation in the minds of patients about medical care and its results.