What does placebo have to do with alternative medication?

Answer 1

A placebo is a kind of a substitute that doesn't really do anything. Medicine is tested by giving some people a placebo, and some people actual medicine just to see if they start feeling better because they think they should, or if the medicine is really working.

Answer 2

Most alternative medicine works like a placebo. You "think" you're going to get better, so you do. Placebos "work" about 1/3 of the time. Strangely, most alternative medicine "works" about 1/3 of the time! In the medical world, something that does not work better than a placebo is considered ineffective and discarded.

Answer 3

"placebos" work about 30% of the time, in other words a person gets better because they think they are taking something to help them. It's not a bad thing, it's using the power of the mind to heal.
alternative medicine benefits from the same thing. If you do something that has absolutely no value at all, 30% of people will get better if they think they're getting treatment. The power of the human mind. I'm not saying alternative medicine doesn't really work.

Answer 4

They have to put a placebo (sugar pill) in a controlled test, because some people feel better when they are taking anything. So, if they do a test and 40% of the people felt better taking the pill, the controlled group is the placebo group. They will ask them the same question, and it's usually between 5% and 10% will say it helped them. So, they have to subtract that from the main group. Example, 40% minus 5% means that it only helped 35% of the people.

Hope that makes sense, it's kind of strange that people have that much faith in pills that it will help them taking sugar. I guess that says something for positive thinking.

Answer 5

placebo

Definition: (plah-SEE-bo) An inactive substance that looks the same as, and is administered in the same way as, a drug in a clinical trial, usually in a double-blinded study.

~~~~~~~~placebo effect~~~~~~~~

~~"The physician's belief in the treatment and the patient's faith in the physician exert a mutually reinforcing effect; the result is a powerful remedy that is almost guaranteed to produce an improvement and sometimes a cure." -- Petr Skrabanek and James McCormick, Follies and Fallacies in Medicine, p. 13.

The placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health not attributable to treatment. This effect is believed by many people to be due to the placebo itself in some mysterious way. A placebo (Latin for "I shall please") is a medication or treatment believed by the administrator of the treatment to be inert or innocuous. Placebos may be sugar pills or starch pills. Even "fake" surgery and "fake" psychotherapy are considered placebos.

The process-of-treatment hypothesis would explain how inert homeopathic remedies and the questionable therapies of many "alternative" health practitioners are often effective or thought to be effective. It would also explain why pills or procedures used by conventional medicine work until they are shown to be worthless.

While skeptics may reject faith, prayer and "alternative" medical practices such as bioharmonics, chiropractic and homeopathy, such practices may not be without their salutary effects. Clearly, they can't cure cancer or repair a punctured lung, and they might not even prolong life by giving hope and relieving distress as is sometimes thought. But administering useless therapies does involve interacting with the patient in a caring, attentive way, and this can provide some measure of comfort. However, to those who say "what difference does it make why something works, as long as it seems to work" I reply that it is likely that there is something which works even better, something for the other two-thirds or one-half of humanity who, for whatever reason, cannot be cured or helped by placebos or spontaneous healing or natural regression of their pain. Furthermore, placebos may not always be beneficial or harmless~~

Answer 6

A placebo is also called a sugar pill. It has no properties that will help anyone, but people can help themselves if they believe the medicine is working. There's a M*A*S*H episode where the 4077 runs out of morphine, and they can't get any for a few days, so they give placebos to the patients, but they convince the patients that it is very potent medicine, and it works.

Answer 7

A placebo is a way of tricking the brain to heal the body and many times this type of "medical psychology" actually works.

Answer 8

The Placebo Effect (characterized by improvement in health undue to medicinal output, but primarily due to psychological factors) proves that individuals who believe they can and will get better are more likely to get better.

Thus, even if the "Alternative Medicine's" drug content has no potency, some users may experience improvement due to this phenomenon.

Answer 9

The placebo efect is actually quite powerful and interesting. When people beleive they are getting powerful medicine, it helps whether the get any meds at all or not. If we can make each other and ourselves feel like some very good powerful medicine is helping us, then it is.

Answer 10

in comparison to the actual medication it shows how well the medications work vs no medication at all when a patient thinks they are being treated. some problems will clear up on their own and some will improve with time and some only with medication. it helps them just the medications validity.