What role does the placebo effect have in alternative medicine?

Answer 1

A placebo effect happens when you are in a study. Someone conducting the study will divide the people into two groups: one getting real treatment and one getting fake treatment. An example might be some people are really getting pills for their disorder while others are just getting sugar pills or something that wouldn't help or harm them. The catch is that people do not know that they are not getting real treatment. Because they think that they are getting treatment, they are feeling better. It is sort of like when your mom kisses your boo-boo. It is an example of mind over matter.

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Sometimes doctors will give placebos to patients when they think that the patient's symptoms are psychosomatic (meaning that it is all in their head). This is illegal but a doctor in an ER once did this to me anyway.

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A placebo is used as a control in clinical trials, to compare the effectiveness of a new drug or intervention with one known to have no direct medical effect. This is necessary because in some conditions expecting an improvement in symptoms may actually precipitate such an improvement, and this bias must be excluded from analysis of the intervention being tested.

Prescribing a placebo during clinical trials without the patient's consent is illegal

Example: Placebo analgesics (for example a cream containing no active ingredients) can reduce pain induced by cutaneous administration of capcasin (which induces pain via TRPV1 channels)

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Placebo is equally there in all systems of medicine, including conventional. Here's an everyday example: when you take an aspirin or paracetamol or whatever for a headache, you might find yourself feeling a little better almost immediately. THAT is placebo; the pill will not have reached the target area that quickly, but a mental trick has occurred.
It refers to the effect of the mind, and feeling a result mainly because you think you will. Placebos are fake pills given to people to make them think they are taking actual pills; because the person thinks they are taking a pill, they may actually feel (or at least think they feel) the effects that they expect from the pill.
placebo affect is also known as the sugar pill affect. It means that you are given something that you think will work, and mentally you make it work, but in reality, what you were given had no effects

Answer 2

A placebo is used when testing medications. Generally, several test patients are given a medication whil others are given a placebo (non-active imposter such as a sugar pill). This allows those responsible for the tests to gauge side effects reported by the "guinea pigs" and to see if the effects of the drug are only in the minds of the test patients.

Answer 3

A placebo is a dummy medical intervention classically represented by the inert "sugar pill". It cannot be equaled to no intervention because of the placebo effect, a medical phenomenon where the results of such intervention are affected by the patient's ideas about how effective the treatment is. Placebos are widely used in contemporary healthcare and the placebo effect is a pervasive phenomenon.[3] The placebo effect points to the importance of perception and the brain's role in physical health.

Answer 4

The easiest way to explain the placebo effect and how it effects medicine is to give you a simple example. Lets say that a drug company wants to conduct an experiment to see how a specific drug effects a group of people. They recruit their test group and tell their volunteers that they will give them the drug, which is to be taken over a specified period of time according to their directions. The catch is that they only give the actual drug to 1/2 of the test group, and they give the other 1/2 of the test group a sugar pill, or placebo, but they do not tell that second group that the drug isn't real. At the end of the experiment, the drug company then performs their research interviews to determine the effects of the "drug" therapy. When those people that were given the sugar pill (placebo) exhibit effects that they were expecting to get from the real drug (even though they weren't given the real drug), it is called the "placebo effect". Basically, they want the effects of the drug, and they claim to get them even when they haven't received the drug. :-)

Answer 5

The placebo effect is that some people effect a full or partial recovery from symptoms even if the 'medication' they are receiving contains no active ingredients. The patient's belief that they are receiving 'treatment' effects a cure or partial cure.

Answer 6

Yes, the placebo response involves the secretion of dopamine