The Placebo Effect - Is it real or just imagined?

According to the articles given by our teacher, the placebo effect is “the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior to a medication or treatment that has been administered”. The idea of the placebo effect developed from the famous H.K Beecher. Beecher developed 15 experiments in which he evaluated 15 clinical trials with numerous and unique diseases. Beecher found out that 35% of 1,082 patients were relieved or healed by a placebo pill. In all the experiments conducted by Beecher on this controversial topic, Beecher implemented medical personnel, this kind of setting gave the patients comfort in the pill they were given to “alleviate” their disorder or disease. Up to this day, there is no correct answer to rely on, even though psychologists have come up with a hypothesis. They say, that is all in the patient’s minds, they say that a person’s beliefs and hopes revolves around neurochemistry and neurochemistry is said to eventually affect one’s biochemical, immune or hormonal system, this, resulting in a person’s well-being or health. Besides there being a quite scientific explanation to it, psychologists mention that a person’s mind is powerful in the sense that when one is told that a pill will cure the ongoing disease they have, it will eventually heal the person since the person is relying and strongly believing that the pill will be the solution to their problem. Although, Beecher’s experiments seem to be quite logical, denunciations towards his experiments have been made. Among these lies the fact that, the patients were taken off a drug because of side effects, this resulting in improvement in the patient’s bodies since they were taken off something that provided harm in their bodies, this having nothing to do with the placebo effect. Another downfall in Beecher’s experiments is that he only reported to percentage of improvement from the placebo, showing absolutely no percentage in deteriorated conditions of the patients. It is said that one-third of the time, the patients showed improvement but not necessarily because of the placebo pills they were on and that about 40% of the time, conditions showed no improvement at all. Beecher’s major limitation in these experiments was that he did not report all of the gathered data. After all, I personally think that placebo pills should be used more often since they do show a lot of improvement in patients as shown by Beecher. Regarding this issue I strongly agree with the used of placebos and definitely think that they do more good than harm as to drugs. Placebos have no side effects whereas drugs do so. I do concord with psychologists when they say that it all lies in our minds. We have the power in ourselves to heal all by our own or with placebo pills which contain no source that says it will heal one even though it does.

Bibliography:
http://www.skepdic.com/placebo.html