It’s time for your placebo Marcel Stive/Plainpicture
LINDA BUONANNO had been sick with irritable bowel syndrome for 15 years when she saw a TV advertisement recruiting participants for a new study. Desperate for help, she signed on, even after learning that the potential treatments she would be offered consisted of either nothing – or pills filled with nothing.
When the experiment ended, she begged the researchers to let her keep the pills. “I felt fantastic,” Buonanno says. “I felt almost like I was before I got sick with IBS. It was the best three weeks of my life.”
She has been trying to get her hands on more ever since. A replication study will start later this spring, and Buonanno is desperately hoping she gets in.
This is the placebo effect in action, and it may come as a surprise to learn that it works even when people know they are being given a sham treatment. That finding has brought with it the possibility of using placebos as therapy. The vision is of a future in which clinicians cajole the mind into healing itself and the body – without the drugs that can be nearly as much of a problem as those they purport to solve.
But before your doctor can prescribe you one of Buonanno’s pills, a lot of slippery questions must be tackled: what conditions respond to the placebo effect? Where are the boundaries of this nascent science? More importantly, can we harness it with predictable effects?
The placebo effect has been on a considerable journey: once …
