Dictionary


pla·ce·bo

/pləˈsēbō/



noun

noun: placebo; plural noun: placebos

  1. 1.a harmless pill, medicine, or procedure prescribed more for the psychological benefit to the patient than for any physiological effect."his Aunt Beatrice had been kept alive on sympathy and placebos for thirty years"

    1. ◦a substance that has no therapeutic effect, used as a control in testing new drugs.

    2. ◦a measure designed merely to calm or please someone.



If you activated the link above in the word placebos you now know a lot about the placebo effect, so if you didn’t, do it now. I’ve followed Ted Kaptchuk and Dr. Irving Hirsch for some years. Their research is state-of-the-art, something users of acupuncture have bandied about for years. Harvard seems to be the hot bed of placebo research so let’s turn now to researchers Richard Harris and V. Napadow who used PET scans to tell the difference between sham acupuncture (placebo) and traditional Chinese acupuncture. This is one of the most important literature references to direct difference between true acupuncture and placebo responses. It says that neuroscience proves  that acupuncture is both.  Let me quote the article:


“…Acupuncture therapy also evoked long-term increases in MOR binding potential in some of the same structures including the cingulate (dorsal and perigenual), caudate, and amygdala. These short- and long-term effects were absent in the sham group where small reductions were observed, an effect more consistent with previous placebo PET studies. Long-term increases in MOR BP following TA were also associated with greater reductions in clinical pain. These findings suggest that divergent MOR processes may mediate clinically relevant analgesic effects for acupuncture and sham acupuncture.”                       Vitaly Napadow


But we must keep in mind here that both psychotherapy and antidepressant treatment are known to have a placebo effect. But, the patients who come to us report no positive effect after several years of treatment, suggesting that these patients are not as prone to placebo as others.



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