Since our last update about Harvard Medical School Professor Ted Kaptchuk’s TEDMED talk in 2014, a longer version of his talk was released above and goes further in depth explaining the placebo effect.
Using a placebo with a small group of people with Parkinson’s disease procued some interesting results. For people on the placebo, the amount of dopamine in the brain increased by a 200 percent equivalent to the dose of their medication prior to them halting their medication intake.
In his experiment with migraine patients, Kaptchuk found that when labeling a placebo as an actual medication and vice versa, there was no significant statistical difference. However, when they gave people the actual drug for headache relief and labeled it as such, reports of pain relief spiked.
“What’s neurobiology, the basic science?” Kaptchuk asked his audience, then partially answered himself saying, “The beginning of an answer can come from the idea and cognitive science that the brain can function as a prediction machine.”
He explained that, “anticipatory mechanisms are critical for human survival,” by providing an example of a person walking in a snake filled forest. Kaptchuk said that if a person knows there are snakes in the forest and sees a long stick on the ground, their brain may register it as a snake.
The doctor applied this metaphor to illnesses by saying:
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
“When a person feels sick and you go into an environment that’s designed to help you, where everyone wants to provide you relief, the brain’s processing of sensations, self awareness and symptoms changes sometimes in a very positive way.”
Even though the results of a placebo can be quite astounding, Kaptchuk doesn’t encourage replacing pharmaceuticals with placebos. He recognized that placebos can not fix major health problems such as cancerous tumors or high cholesterol levels, but show the most promise when the illness can be partially controlled by the patient’s mentality.
Kaptchuk wound up the TEDMED talk saying:
“What placebo studies do, is take the tools of medicine and changes the art of medicine into the science of clinical care and demonstrates that the human dimensions of providing healthcare can alleviate symptoms and change the course of illness even without pharmaceuticals.”
Video: TEDMED
