What is the Placebo Effect?

Placebo Effect: Also known as fake drug effect, fake drug effect, and agent effect, it means that although the patient receives ineffective treatment, he "expects" or "believes" that the treatment is effective and relieves the patient's symptoms The phenomenon.

Placebo Effect: Also known as fake drug effect, fake drug effect, and agent effect, it means that although the patient receives ineffective treatment, he "expects" or "believes" that the treatment is effective and relieves the patient's symptoms The phenomenon.

Chinese name

Placebo effect

Applied discipline

psychology

Application range

Clinical and Counseling Psychology

Placebo effect concept

The placebo effect is also known as the pseudo drug effect, counterfeit drug effect, and proxy effect (English: Placebo Effect, derived from the Latin placebo, meaning "I am willing" and understood as "I will be comforted"). Treatment, but "expected" or "believed" that the treatment is effective, so that the patient's symptoms are relieved. ^[1]

Placebo effect test

The placebo effect was proposed by Henry K. Beecher in 1955 and is also understood as a "non-specific effect" or a subject's expected effect.

An opposite effect exists at the same time-the Nocebo effect: The patient does not believe that the treatment is effective and may worsen the condition. The anti-placebo effect (the Latin nocebo solution "I will hurt") can be detected in the same way as the placebo effect. For example, a group of control groups taking ineffective drugs will experience worsening symptoms. This phenomenon is believed to be due to the negative attitude of the people receiving the drug on the efficacy of the drug, which has therefore offset the placebo effect and an anti-placebo effect. This effect is not caused by the medications taken, but based on the patient's psychological expectations for recovery.

Medical staff can use placebos to stimulate patients' placebo effects. When you firmly believe in a certain medicine, you can enhance the therapeutic effect of the medicine and improve the quality of medical treatment. When a new drug is introduced and its value is evaluated, the placebo effect of the drug must be estimated. If the efficacy of a new drug is similar to that of placebo after trials with double-blind methods, and there is no significant difference, the clinical use value of this new drug is not significant. This is why when new drugs were first introduced, people often regarded them as a panacea, and after a period of use, their craze disappeared and their value dropped. Placebo effects abound during drug use. Even for a serious organic disease such as angina pectoris, more than a third of patients have improved symptoms with placebo, and many analgesics have a significant placebo effect. In some patients, side effects of nausea, headache, dizziness, and drowsiness can also occur when using placebo, which is also a placebo effect.

People who are prone to the corresponding psychological and physiological effects when using a placebo are called placebo responders. The personality characteristics of this kind of people are: good communication, dependence, susceptibility to hints, lack of self-confidence, good attention to their various physiological changes and discomfort, a tendency to suspect illness and neuroticism.

The placebo effect is an unstable state that can change depending on the nature of the disease, the psychological state after the illness, the degree of discomfort or sickness, and self-evaluation, as well as the words and actions of the medical staff and changes in the environmental medical atmosphere. Therefore, the placebo effect is sometimes obvious, sometimes not obvious, or not at all. We should keep in mind that the placebo effect is more likely to occur in patients, and it occurs in approximately 35% of patients with physical illness and 40% of patients with mental illness. It is also because of the psychological characteristics of the patients that Jiangjiang Doctors and Witch Doctor Warlocks have an active market to perform their skills.

Placebo effect application

The "placebo effect" in psychological counseling refers to a psychological phenomenon in which a counselor provides a "placebo" to a visitor during the consultation, which enables the visitor to promote psychological alleviation or improvement of the condition due to expectations. The "placebo" in psychological counseling includes psychopathological drugs, biologically neutral substances, the image of the consultant, the consultant's speech and non-verbal technology, and the construction of the counseling environment. And environmental implications guide visitors to change and develop themselves. The difference between psychological counseling and "placebo" in clinical medicine is that it places more emphasis on the image of the counselor, guidance to the visitor, and the construction of the psychological counseling environment. "Is even more effective.

The subject's "placebo effect" is essentially a hint effect. It is a combination of multiple psychological counseling methods, mainly including hypnosis, cognitive therapy, suggestive therapy, human-centered psychotherapy, and image dialogue technology, self-defense, Principles of psychological counseling theory and technology such as behavior therapy. The ultimate goal of psychological counseling is to "help the client's self-reliance and self-reliance", so the "placebo" of psychological counseling is not only the use of drugs, but also to guide the psychological development of the client in a positive direction. The placebo of the drug is mainly produced by the visitor's understanding and feeling of the drug and the psychological-physiological interaction caused by the medication behavior itself. The environment construction and consultants' professional ability needs to take the psychological needs of various visitors as the fundamental starting point, so as to bring psychological impacts to the visitors through the "first impression" and verbal cues. The "placebo effect" is applicable to two aspects in psychological counseling. One is the people who are easily suggestive. The personality characteristics of these individuals include interaction with others, dependence, susceptibility to suggestion, lack of self-confidence, and attention to each other. This kind of physiological changes and discomforts; the second is the psychological diseases that are susceptible to hints, such as hysteria, obsessive-compulsive disorder, some phobias, anxiety syndrome, suspected disease syndrome and neuroticism. If both are available, a "placebo" is more likely to produce results. ^[1]