Brain's Release of Endorphins Causes Placeo Effect

New research suggests that placebos work because your belief system tells your brain to block the pain or discomfort. In the study, researchers found that when patients expect a treatment to be effective, the brain area responsible for pain control is activated, causing the release of natural endorphins.

These endorphins then send a cascade of instructions down to the spinal cord to suppress incoming pain signals and patients feel better, regardless of whether the treatment ~ a pill or some other medical intervention ~ had any authentic direct effect.

According to the London Times:

The sequence of events in the brain closely mirrors the way opioid drugs, such as morphine, work ~ adding weight to the view that the placebo effect is grounded in physiology.

The finding strengthens the argument that many established medical treatments derive part of their effectiveness from the patients’ expectation that the drugs will make them better.

The latest studies on antidepressants suggest that at least 75 per cent of the benefit comes from the placebo effect. GPs also observe that patients report feeling better only days after being prescribed antidepressants, even though the direct effects take several weeks to kick in.

In the study, published this week in the journal Science, the spinal cords of 15 healthy volunteers were scanned using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The scan examined the dorsal horn, which transmits pain signals coming up through the spinal cord into the pain-related areas in the brain.

During the scan, the volunteers received laser “pinpricks” to their hands. The volunteers were told that a pain-relief cream had been applied to one of their hands and a control cream to the other. But unknown to the volunteers, an identical control cream was administered to both hands.

When people believed that they had received the active cream, they reported feeling 25 per cent less pain and showed significantly reduced activity in the spinal cord pathway that processes pain.

“We’ve shown that psychological factors can influence pain at the earliest stage of the central nervous system, in a similar way to drugs like morphine,” said Falk Eippert, of the University Medical Centre Hamburg-Eppendorf, who led the study.

Click here for the London Times article.

Placebo Part 1: "Dummy" Drugs Getting Stronger

For years I’ve been interested in the so-called “placebo effect,” where some non-pharmaceutical element such as a sugar pill ~ when administered to an unknowing patient or test subject ~ actually outperforms the medicine against which it’s being tested.

Placebos are one of the most profound examples of mind-over-matter ever scientifically documented.

According to a recent, excellent Wired magazine article, placebos are somehow getting stronger. In clinical FDA testing, placebos are outperforming many new “medicines” developed by pharmaceutical giants and are even proving more effective than long-standing medications such as Prozac.

As you can imagine, this new development is playing havoc with the pharmaceutical industry. I'm wondering if this could be linked to the evolving human consciousness, though there's little chance that conventional science would support that hypothesis. According to Wired:

From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

. . . It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them.

. . . It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger. The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis. The stakes could hardly be higher. In today's economy, the fate of a long-established company can hang on the outcome of a handful of tests.

As a result of this, scientists are finally dedicating more study to the mind’s ability to heal our bodies.

Long overdue, in my humble opinion.

Click here for the complete Wired article.

Phobia-Erasing Drugs Discovered

Dutch scientists have discovered that a family of drugs called “beta blockers” can erase bad memories, including phobias. The discovery is igniting medical ethics debates across Europe, according to the London Mail.

The scientists actually discovered the drugs’ memory-erasing properties while working with patients with heart disease, for whom the beta-blocking drugs are sometimes prescribed. They found that the beta-blockers interfere with how the brain makes and remakes memories of frightening events.

To test the drugs' memory-altering capability, a Dutch medical team created fearful memories in volunteers by showing them pictures of spiders, while also administering electrical shocks. The following day the volunteers were split into two groups: One given the beta-blocker, the other a placebo. Both groups were then shown spider pictures and their fear responses were recorded.

The group given the beta-blocker had a much weaker fear response than the other group. Both groups were tested on the following day ~ two days after the initial fright ~ and the beta-blocker group essentially were without memory of the spiders, while the control group continued to exhibit considerable fear.

Click here for the complete London Mail article.
Photo is "Phobia" by Joshua Hoffine.

Thanks to my friend Ludmil Marcov for alerting me to this article.

Placebo Effect Occurs with Acupuncture Too

I’m a firm believer in acupuncture, having had a number of maladies ~ including a couple of serious ones ~ seemingly remedied by the needles. Yet I’m not surprised at the new studies showing a portion of acupuncture’s benefit is the placebo effect.

There’s no reason why acupuncture shouldn’t be susceptible to placebo along with the rest of the world’s medical cures. I just hope people don’t take the unwarranted leap to see the studies as somehow denigrating acupuncture’s effectiveness.

Acupuncture is based on the theory of lines of energy running along meridians through the body. With acupressure, a fingertip or a bead is used to press a specific pressure point, while needles are used in acupuncture to stimulate the meridians and cure energy blockages responsible for much illness.

The placebo effect is mostly a mind-over-matter cure. If a person believed totally in the efficacy of acupuncture, it is reasonable that his or her mind could enact a cure even if the needles were misplaced, since a placebo cure would have no direct relation to the needles anyway.

German researchers have fueled the current discussions by releasing a study where needles were inserted at fake points to cure specific conditions ~ mostly headaches ~ yet the cures occurred anyway. According to Reuters News:

Their findings suggest the benefits of acupuncture may stem more from people's belief in the technique, said Klaus Linde, a complementary medicine researcher at the Technical University in Munich, who led the analysis published in the Cochrane Review journal.

"Much of the clinical benefit of acupuncture might be due to non-specific needling effects and powerful placebo effects, meaning selection of specific needle points may be less important than many practitioners have traditionally argued," he said in a statement.

Several studies have shown both treatments may stimulate the release of hormones known as endorphins, which can relieve stress, pain and nausea.

Linde and colleagues conducted two separate reviews that included 33 studies of nearly 7,000 men and women to see whether the technique was effective at preventing headaches and migraines.

The studies concluded that people treated with acupuncture suffered fewer headaches compared to men and women given only pain killers. When it came to migraines, the needles beat drugs but faked treatments worked too, the researchers said. For less severe headaches, acupuncture worked just slightly better than sticking the needles randomly, the researchers said.

"Doctors need to know how long improvements associated with acupuncture will last and whether better trained acupuncturists really achieve better results than those with basic training only," Linde told Reuters.