greentheo

According to this article on Slate.com … most of the healing effect for Airborne and other cold medicines comes not from the herbs or chemicals, but the belief that the herbs and chemicals are working to heal you.

I’ve recently read that most colds, headaches and general ailments are caused by conflicting emotional and subconscious forces. In other words, we are both the cause and the cure for many of our own ailments.

The whole article linked to above is worth reading, but here’s an excerpt to pique your interest.

Question: Are people deluded, or do products like this [Airborne] work? My answer, surprisingly, is that they do work—but only if you believe and thus deceive yourself. When you take the medicine you believe in, you won’t notice when your nose runs anyway, and if you forget to take it before flying, you won’t remember that your trip ended in perfect health. That’s why it is so important that real studies of efficacy and safety include both the medication under evaluation and a placebo that looks, smells, and tastes just like it.

Findings: A very nice recent piece of research illustrates both the powerful effect of expectations and the subtle forces that influence them. The research group offered the experimental subjects a “new pain-relieving drug”—actually a placebo—and measured how well it relieved the pain of an electric shock. The subjects were divided into two groups. Both were given the same placebo pills and both were exposed to the same painful shocks, but one group was told that the pills cost $2.50 each and the other group was told that the pills were discounted to 10 cents. (I suppose because no one in their right mind would believe that a real pharmaceutical manufacturer would sell something so cheaply.) Both pills worked to reduce pain, but the $2.50 pill worked a lot better than the cheaper one.

Conclusion: I’m betting that even though Airborne’s settlement includes an offer of refunds to disappointed buyers, the company won’t have to pay a lot of them. It’s a

My favorite part is how more expensive pain killers seem to do a better job than the cheap ones… or is that more expensive placebo?

Related posts:

1. Government and Fed are hard at work concentrating power in the hands of the wealthy.
2. The Power of Downgrading
3. Away from the desk

This entry was posted on Monday, March 17th, 2008 at 11:24 am and is filed under Miscellaneous. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.