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

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

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