Hello Professor and Classmates,
The placebo effect is a very interesting topic. I haven’t really thought about the placebo effect very much. I didn’t have much knowledge of it until this week’s discussion. I mostly heard about the placebo in medical trials or drug trials.
I didn’t know it at the time, but when I was a child I fell victim to the placebo effect a lot. My parents would give me pills for everything; if I had a headache my mom had a pill for that, if I was sick she had a pill for that. I didn’t know until later in life that my parents did not like giving me actual medicine for anything as a child, when I was sick my parents would take me to the doctors but it was extremely rare for my parents to give me any medications. The would give me tic tacs or other types of sugar pills and it seems to worked I always felt better as soon as they handed me a pill and told me it would make me feel better.
I found it interesting in the Lehrer article that it says, “we forgot, of course, that until the 20th century almost all medicine was nothing but the placebo effect” (Lehrer, 2007). Is it possible that modern medicine is the same? If the placebo effect is so effective and it helps people get better just by tricking your mind to think that you are getting rid of your ailment, then we only need medicines when a illness is really bad and the part of the brain that is responsible for the placebo effect is damaged.
Lehrer, J. (2007, September 7). The placebo effect [Web log post]. Retrieved from http://scienceblogs.com/cortex/2007/09/07/the-placebo-effe...
