Placebos Have A Place In Prepping Medicine

Placebos have a place in prepping? Really? 

Yes, really.

Placebos Are Medically Proven To Work

Let’s start with the bottom line… placebos are medically proven to work in many situations, and there is verified, peer reviewed research all over the place to support this.

Here’s an excerpt from Dr. Irving Kirsch’s book The Power of Belief: Psychosocial Influences on Illness, Disability and Medicine:

“The colour of a placebo can influence its effects. When administered without information about whether they are stimulants or depressives, blue placebo pills produce depressant effects, whereas red placebos induce stimulant effects (Blackwell et al., 1972). Patients report falling asleep significantly more quickly and sleeping longer after taking a blue capsule than after taking an orange capsule (Luchelli et al., 1978). Red placebos are more effective pain relievers than white, blue or green placebos (Huskisson, 1974; Nagao et al., 1968).” (1)

The Placebo Effect

First, what is a placebo?

A placebo is a pill (or liquid, injection, etc.) that is either inert or that has no physiological therapeutic effect. By itself, it does absolutely nothing to help or hinder a problem.

So it’s medically useless? No, it’s not, because of something called the placebo effect. The placebo effect is when the brain itself creates a reaction based on the belief that the placebo will work. The pretty colored sugar pill actually has a real and measurable effect; just because the brain decided it would.

Why is there such a thing as the placebo effect?

The brain is a powerful thing. All perceptions arise in the brain: A burned finger doesn’t hurt, it sends electrical signals to the brain, which interprets the information and produces the pain. Sleep is a thing the brain does. Alertness, anxiety, fatigue — all of these are mostly or completely states the brain itself produces and you feel.  

Even when a reaction is not created in the brain, what the brain does can often influence it. For example, the immune system is not primarily run by the brain. Those white blood cells will do largely the same thing in the culture dish as they will in the body the brain controls. However, the stress hormones the brain released will cause some changes in what the white blood cells do; so the brain affects the immune reaction although it can’t control it.

A lot of this stuff the brain does is well below consciousness. The deeper parts of the brain don’t tell the conscious self what they’re doing. Heck, sometimes the deeper parts and conscious self even believe different things: Researchers can tell a person they’re taking a placebo, and those people still show more effect than the people who get nothing to swallow. Not as much reaction as those who aren’t  told it’s a placebo; but still, it’s a measurable effect. It’s wild!

In short, there’s a placebo effect because the belief of the subconscious levels of the brain have decided that the treatment will have an effect.

The Nocibo Effect

Sadly, nocibo effects are equally real. A nocibo is a negative side effect from a placebo treatment. For example, you have three groups that are having some pain. You give group Real real painkillers, like ibuprofen. You give group Placebo a placebo and tell them it’s a painkiller. You give group Nada nothing at all. 

The Real group reports the greatest pain relief. The Placebo group reports some pain relief (usually not as much as the Real group). The Nada group reports little change. That’s evidence of the placebo effect.

Also, the Real group and the Placebo group report more upset stomachs, rashes, and sleep disturbance than the Nada group. The side effects suffered by the Placebo group are called nocibo effects. 

Let’s Hear From An Expert

Dr. Kirsch is one of the leading information sources on the placebo effect, and in an interview with the National Center for Biotechnology Information’s writer William Scott, Dr. Kirsch said the following: 

“Emotions, expectancies, and behavioral conditioning like that of Pavlov’s dog have long been known to affect the body. This is the basis of the placebo effect. Timothy Walsh has done a meta-analysis on the effects of placebo and drugs over time. He showed that as public awareness of antidepressants increased, the response to drugs and placebos for depression also increased.¹ This shows how beliefs about the effectiveness of a drug can change the effect of prescribing it.”

Spice Reads A Placebo Study And Decodes It For Us

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(72)90996-8/fulltext

Oh, this was fun. It is actually an article on medical education, but it shows the power of placebo and nocibo effects too. They fed placebos to a bunch of medical students (telling them they were either real stimulants or sedatives) and had the students report on the effects. 

Of the students fed blue pills, 66% reported they were less alert, and 72% reported becoming drowsy. Of the students fed the pink pills, only 26% reported being less alert and 37% drowsy. (Let med students sit still for any reason and the sleep deprivation sneaks up on some of them, it seems.) 

The students as a group also reported they’d found the experiment very useful in helping them understand the real effectiveness of placeobos, by the way.

The Dirty Little Secret Of Placebos & Medicine

Here’s the dirty little secret that nobody in the prepping community wants to talk about… a lot of “alternative remedies” are actually using the placebo effect, not changing body chemistry to solve a problem.

Because there is a lack of peer reviewed studies, resources and documentation on a LOT of alternative medicine, most information that’s shared about alternative treatments is from personal observation.

One might question as to whether a person is helped to feel better by the actual drug/herb/oil/treatment or if it’s the placebo effect.

Our answer?

As long as the pill/oil/treatment/whatever does no harm and the condition improves upon treatment, we simply don’t care if it’s physiologically or psychologically caused.

Treatments with physiological actions are preferred. They work well in people less susceptible to placebos. Also, they can double dip – help due to the placebo effect and the physiological effect. But hey, we’ll take whatever benefit we can get.

The key, of course, is “does no harm” because we don’t want to set aside safety in any way, shape or form. We don’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.

Some People Are More Susceptible To The Placebo Effect

It’s kinda weird but it’s true, some people are more susceptible to the effect.

In our household, Salty is VERY prone to be aided by the placebo effect, despite the fact that he knows all about it (and is actually writing this section of the story).

Why does it work even though he knows about it? 

Because, like the picture above, he doesn’t care HOW it works, just that it does.

So Why Are Placebos Specifically Important To Prepper Medics?

Because, frankly, we may not have the drugs that we need, but we can use the placebo effect in many cases to provide relief from symptoms, lower tension (thereby lowering blood pressure), relieve stress & anxiety and in many cases relieve pain.

The thing most people don’t realize is that the placebo effect is REAL, it is demonstrably effective (much more so than most people would guess), and scientifically supported.

If you are a prepper medic and you have an inert pill you can give somebody who is suffering from some pain, and 20 minutes later that person is feeling better because they know they have been treated (stress levels are down, blood pressure down, the person is more relaxed and pain subsides) isn’t that a good thing? 

Obviously, there are things that placebos are not useful for. They are not, for example, going to knock out an infection. They may give the immune system a bit of a boost; but that’s a pretty minor help. There are also things that they will often work well for: pain, sleep, depression, even allergies. Why not provide relief where and how you can? 

Maximize the placebo, minimize the nocibo

Treatments that ‘seem right’ – match the patient’s expectations – work best. Blue pills sedate, red pills increase alertness. Two pills work better than one (although a handful would probably work less well, being implausible). Things that smell nice promote sleep better than things that smell nasty, etc. 

And the nocibos? Make it known that the treatment isn’t known to have serious side effects. Minor ones maybe (because potent drugs do have side effects, right?) 

I’m not big on lying to Salty (even for such good reasons), but I’m shameless about giving him something with a confident smile and a “See how this goes for you” or an “I think this will help.” I do think it’ll help; his brain loves to help me out by producing placebo effects. 

We did a podcast in our website’s early days, here’s a link to it if the subject interests you:

 

(1) From Prof Irving Kirch’s chapter on placebo in The Power of Belief: Psychosocial Influences on Illness, Disability and Medicine (ISBN 0198530110).