3 ms·

> inject someone in pain with morphine. do it repeatedly over time. once, without telling them, inject them with saline instead. their brain will respond as if

> inject someone in pain with morphine. do it repeatedly over time. once, without telling them, inject them with saline instead. their brain will respond as if it was morphine and continue to block the pain. I must admit I have a very hard time believing this exact claim as written. Do you have any sources?

seiji 14y ago
A talky explanation is included in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQS0tdIbJ0w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQS0tdIbJ0w As for other sources, just type random related words into a search engine until something reliable pops out. You'll mostly find pop science articles including the word placebo though.
lutusp 14y ago
> I must admit I have a very hard time believing this exact claim as written. Do you have any sources? As it happens, one of the original placebo observations took place in a battlefield hospital that had run out of morphine. A physician began injecting saline, hoping the switch wouldn't cause too much psychological stress. To his surprise, many of his patients continued to report pain relief. Source: http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/articles/2012/the-power-of-the-placebo/ http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/art... "While treating wounded American soldiers during World War II, Henry Beecher ran out of pain-killing morphine. Desperate, he decided to continue telling the soldiers that he was giving them morphine, although he was actually infusing them with a saline solution. Amazingly, 40 percent of the soldiers reported that the saline treatment eased their pain."
- psykotic 14y ago
  That's not a controlled study, plus the effect claimed is much weaker than what I was addressing. I can believe that placebo provides some pain relief--I was addressing the claim that they provided identical levels of relief. All the studies I could find on PubMed comparing morphine to placebo for treating various kinds of pain have morphine as the undisputed winner.
  - seiji 14y ago
    It's not morphine or salt water. It's morphine->morphine->morphine->morphine->salt water. Pharmaceutical studies of only using drug or not-drug have different characteristics.
    - psykotic 14y ago
      I got that from your original post. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any studies with that experimental setup, hence my earlier question to you.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > I can believe that placebo provides some pain relief--I was addressing the claim that they provided identical levels of relief. I doubt that any serious researcher will make that claim. Such studies are, after all, based on self-reporting, notoriously unreliable and difficult to accurately quantify. This is not to say that psychologists won't make claims like that. But psychological science is only peripherally related to the other kind of science -- the real kind.
  - 31reasons 14y ago
    >That's not a controlled study Just wondering, how could you get rid of the placebo effect in the placebo experiment?
    - psykotic 14y ago
      Fair point. I was using "controlled" as a shorthand for the usual qualities (double blind, randomized, sufficiently many test subjects, etc) you'd associate with good experimental design.
    - lutusp 14y ago
      > ... how could you get rid of the placebo effect in the placebo experiment? That's easy -- give one group a real placebo, give the other an imitation.
iskander 14y ago
Some related studies: 'Partial antagonism of placebo analgesia by naloxone' (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6308540 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6308540) -- no actual morphine was ever adminstered, only a regimen of saline injections, whose placebo effect is apparently achieved by the release of endogenous opioids. 'A comprehensive review of the placebo effect'(http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebarticle.pdf http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebartic...): "placebos have actual biological effects on the brain and body and are more than response biases."
- jrogers65 14y ago
  In case you missed it, endocannabinoids (CB1 agonism, in particular) appear to account for the other half of placebo analgesia: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n10/full/nm.2435.html http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n10/full/nm.2435.html

seiji 14y ago

A talky explanation is included in http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQS0tdIbJ0w http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gQS0tdIbJ0w As for other sources, just type random related words into a search engine until something reliable pops out. You'll mostly find pop science articles including the word placebo though.

lutusp 14y ago

> I must admit I have a very hard time believing this exact claim as written. Do you have any sources? As it happens, one of the original placebo observations took place in a battlefield hospital that had run out of morphine. A physician began injecting saline, hoping the switch wouldn't cause too much psychological stress. To his surprise, many of his patients continued to report pain relief. Source: http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/articles/2012/the-power-of-the-placebo/ http://www.brainfacts.org/sensing-thinking-behaving/mood/art... "While treating wounded American soldiers during World War II, Henry Beecher ran out of pain-killing morphine. Desperate, he decided to continue telling the soldiers that he was giving them morphine, although he was actually infusing them with a saline solution. Amazingly, 40 percent of the soldiers reported that the saline treatment eased their pain."

psykotic 14y ago
That's not a controlled study, plus the effect claimed is much weaker than what I was addressing. I can believe that placebo provides some pain relief--I was addressing the claim that they provided identical levels of relief. All the studies I could find on PubMed comparing morphine to placebo for treating various kinds of pain have morphine as the undisputed winner.
- seiji 14y ago
  It's not morphine or salt water. It's morphine->morphine->morphine->morphine->salt water. Pharmaceutical studies of only using drug or not-drug have different characteristics.
  - psykotic 14y ago
    I got that from your original post. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find any studies with that experimental setup, hence my earlier question to you.
- lutusp 14y ago
  > I can believe that placebo provides some pain relief--I was addressing the claim that they provided identical levels of relief. I doubt that any serious researcher will make that claim. Such studies are, after all, based on self-reporting, notoriously unreliable and difficult to accurately quantify. This is not to say that psychologists won't make claims like that. But psychological science is only peripherally related to the other kind of science -- the real kind.
- 31reasons 14y ago
  >That's not a controlled study Just wondering, how could you get rid of the placebo effect in the placebo experiment?
  - psykotic 14y ago
    Fair point. I was using "controlled" as a shorthand for the usual qualities (double blind, randomized, sufficiently many test subjects, etc) you'd associate with good experimental design.
  - lutusp 14y ago
    > ... how could you get rid of the placebo effect in the placebo experiment? That's easy -- give one group a real placebo, give the other an imitation.

iskander 14y ago

Some related studies: 'Partial antagonism of placebo analgesia by naloxone' (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6308540 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6308540) -- no actual morphine was ever adminstered, only a regimen of saline injections, whose placebo effect is apparently achieved by the release of endogenous opioids. 'A comprehensive review of the placebo effect'(http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebarticle.pdf http://pharmacology.ucsd.edu/graduate/courseinfo/placebartic...): "placebos have actual biological effects on the brain and body and are more than response biases."

jrogers65 14y ago
In case you missed it, endocannabinoids (CB1 agonism, in particular) appear to account for the other half of placebo analgesia: http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n10/full/nm.2435.html http://www.nature.com/nm/journal/v17/n10/full/nm.2435.html