Our body is a fascinating system since it is capable of creating a cure and producing deadly poison. While many people are worried about the possible disease or any other health problem, their subconscious creates the poison for their bodies. This article will talk about how our bodies make the poison and how to stop it.
Many people already know about the placebo effect, which happens when patients think they’re getting a fancy new drug, but what they’re getting is just a sugar pill. Then, in a case of “mind over medicine,” they start to recover from their ailment as though they’d been taking the real deal.
However, our body system also has the opposite of the placebo effect called the nocebo effect. It’s what happens when a patient is given a sugar pill but told it’s a drug with terrible side effects, then starts to exhibit those symptoms. The nocebo effect can also occur when a doctor tells a patient that a surgical procedure could have negative results — after that, just knowing the risks could negatively impact the patient’s recovery progress just because of the patient’s mindset.
John Kelley, Ph.D., deputy director of Harvard Medical School’s Program, said that for quite some time, people already noticing this effect. When we look at any randomized trials, it’s surprising how similar the placebo side effect with the active treatment. It’s the power of the imagination. If we ask someone to imagine a visual scene in their minds, we can see on an MRI that their occipital lobes, the parts of their brains involved with vision, are activated. If you tell people to imagine doing some physical activity, you’ll see the motor cortex showing activation. Just imagining something is happening is enough to activate those portions of the brain associated with that thought, or worry, or pain.”
In 2012, researchers from the Technical University of Munich in Germany published an in-depth review on the nocebo effect. They looked at 31 empirical studies and found that not only does the nocebo effect exist, but it’s also surprisingly common. It’s also causing an ethical dilemma for doctors and nurses. Since if they inform patients as to the potential risks and adverse side effects of a given treatment, the patients may believe they’ll experience those harmful results, and it could be a self-fulfilling prophecy. However, if they do not inform their patients about the risks, they will face a possible lawsuit for malpractice or violating informed-consent laws.
The researchers and doctors said that there are exciting possibilities to overcome Nocebo Effect. One of them is John Kelley, Ph.D., who explains that he and his team work on open-label placebo treatments. The patient knows the doctors giving them a placebo, but doctors will explain the positive results of placebos, the patient has a positive expectation, and there are more positive results.
Believing in a placebo is not going to reduce brain tumors or heal broken bones. But it can work with more subjective outcomes, like the degree to which you feel pain or depression. If we believe the advantages of our treatments will exceed the disadvantages, it will increase our chances of getting a successful result.