{"id":35618,"date":"2021-11-08T12:40:09","date_gmt":"2021-11-08T01:40:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=35618"},"modified":"2021-11-08T12:52:12","modified_gmt":"2021-11-08T01:52:12","slug":"the-weird-science-of-the-placebo-effect-keeps-getting-more-interesting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=35618","title":{"rendered":"The weird science of the placebo effect keeps getting more interesting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-medium wp-image-35625\" src=\"http:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Placebo-300x205.png\" alt=\"Placebo\" width=\"300\" height=\"205\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Placebo-300x205.png 300w, https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Placebo-768x525.png 768w, https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/11\/Placebo.png 884w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 300px) 100vw, 300px\" \/><\/p>\n<p>The story of the placebo effect used to be simple: When people don\u2019t know they are taking sugar pills or think they\u00a0<em>might<\/em>\u00a0be a real treatment, the pills can work. It\u2019s a foundational idea in medicine and in clinical drug trials\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/jamanetwork.com\/journals\/jama\/article-abstract\/303530\">dating back to the 1950s<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>Then\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/ghsm.hms.harvard.edu\/faculty-staff\/ted-jack-kaptchuk\">Ted Kaptchuk<\/a>\u00a0came along.<\/p>\n<p>Kaptchuk is a professor at Harvard Medical School, and over the past decade, he and colleagues have shown, in study after study, that giving people placebos openly \u2014 that is, telling them they are taking a placebo \u2014 helps them feel better. Specifically, they found a placebo can relieve not just pain but also anxiety and fatigue.<\/p>\n<p>When Kaptchuk first had the idea to give people sugar pills and tell them they were placebos, his team said, \u201cTed, this is the stupidest idea you\u2019ve come up with yet,\u201d he recalls. It was just taken for granted that placebos needed to be secret to work.<\/p>\n<p>Finish reading:\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nexusnewsfeed.com\/article\/consciousness\/the-weird-science-of-the-placebo-effect-keeps-getting-more-interesting\/\">https:\/\/www.nexusnewsfeed.com\/article\/consciousness\/the-weird-science-of-the-placebo-effect-keeps-getting-more-interesting\/<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The story of the placebo effect used to be simple: When people don\u2019t know they are taking sugar pills or think they\u00a0might\u00a0be a real treatment, the pills can work. It\u2019s a foundational idea in medicine and in clinical drug trials\u00a0dating back to the 1950s. Then\u00a0Ted Kaptchuk\u00a0came along. Kaptchuk is a professor at Harvard Medical School, &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/?p=35618\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The weird science of the placebo effect keeps getting more interesting&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-35618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-health-tips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35618"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":35626,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35618\/revisions\/35626"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.tomgrimshaw.com\/tomsblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}