what is the "placebo effect"?

Question

something i heard recently.

Answer 1

its like basil or oregano, but its supposed to work.

Answer 2

It's a way of saying that sometimes medicine "works" because you expect it to. Say you have a headache and you take what you think is an Excedrin. You will believe that your headache will be gone soon and before you know it, it is. Later, you find out that it wasn't medicine you took, it was actually a sugar pill.

Whenever drug companies are testing a new drug, they give out some "placebos" which aren't medicine. They are basically candy. The people who take the drugs then report whether or not they feel better. Sometimes the people who took the placebos claim that the pill cured them. It's the Placebo Effect.

Answer 3

Like if someone says they "need" some medication to get through the day you give them a placebo (just a pill of sugar, but the person taking it doesn't know that) and see if they act any differently. This theory proves that the human mind often reacts just thinking it has something in it.

Answer 4

It is the effect that your mind has on you when you are doing something. For example, when studies are done for new medications, some people are given a pill with no medication in it and some are given the medication that is being studied. But some people taking the non-medicated pill (or the placebo) may report that it helps them just because in their mind they want it to help and think it is the real pill.

Answer 5

A placebo is a sugar pill used in clinical trials, that which the taker does not realize. Somtimes people taking placebos show similar or higher impovement rates than those taking the real medications.

Answer 6

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.

Answer 7

Is the phenomenon that a patient's symptoms can be alleviated by an otherwise ineffective treatment, since the individual expects or believes that it will work. Some people consider this to be a remarkable aspect of human physiology; others consider it to be an illusion arising from the way medical experiments were conducted. The phenomenon, if it exists at all, is not fully understood by science

Answer 8

It's a thoroughly tested phenomenon, where people begin to feel better because they think they should. For example, many drugs are tested by giving part of a group actual medication, and the other half sugar pills that don't do anything. Then when the researchers factor in the drugs effectiveness they subtract the percentage of people who felt better even though they actually took fake medicine.

Answer 9

It's where you give someone a false treatment/medicine, when you think their sickness is more of a mental thing than a physical thing(they think they're sick so they start to feel sick, instead of actually being sick). The term for the false medicine is called a placebo, and it's usually just a sugar pill.

Answer 10

If because of something that doesn't exist, but you're are made to believe it does, you feel better, that's the placebo effect.

It's similar to what works for people, when they feel better because they believe in a god that'll take care of them.

Answer 11

The beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patients expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.