3 ms·
It gets quite strange: A prominent placebo researcher, Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti, was able to show just how peculiar the placebo effect really is. After inducing
by david927 8y ago
It gets quite strange:
A prominent placebo researcher, Dr. Fabrizio Benedetti, was able to show just how peculiar the placebo effect really is. After inducing pain in participants for seven days whilst treating them with morphine, Benedetti secretly switched the pain medication to salt water. Luckily for him, the participants’ reports of pain went unchanged. Then things got weirder. Benedetti didn’t want to stop there, so he [secretively] gave the participants a morphine blocker and, bizarrely, the participants found that their pain returned, suggesting a form of biochemical reaction to the salt water placebo.
So you give people morphine and it works (to block pain). Switch it secretly with salt water and it still works. Secretly add a real morphine blocker and it no longer works. Bizarre.
- minor3rd 8y ago> suggesting a form of biochemical reaction to the salt water placebo. I know this was a quote from the article, but... Does it really suggest that? Isn't it possible something else is going on?
- bergoid 8y agoCould it be that this morphine blocker is blocking endorphins? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endorphin
- Cyph0n 8y agoWow.. so the body somehow chemically "flagged" the salt water as morphine? That's bizarre.
- bambax 8y agoA possible explanation could be that the body gets the "hint" that morphine blocks pain, and starts to make its own; then when you administer the morphine blocker, it doesn't react with salt water but with the body's morphine (or equivalent).