The brain is by far the most spectacularly complex part of the human body. Our body carries out actions, due to our brain, that we did not purposely control such as breathing. We also do not have conscious thought on controlling our immune system. Typically, our brain doesn’t get confused when it comes to unconscious thought such as breathing and our immune system, but sometimes our brains get mislead or tricked. For example, a little boy around the age of five is swinging on a swing set. Suddenly, he falls off the swing, and he manages to obtain a small cut on his forearm. The boy, with a river of tears running down his face, cries intensely for his mother. She comes running to the rescue with a band aid and places it over the cut assuring …show more content…
Placebos are simply a substance given or an action done to give hope and cause responses in the body when possibly other therapeutic methods have been having no effect. Ted Kaptchuk, who is a professor at the Harvard School of Medicine, describes placebo effects as an “inert substance” (8). As so, Kaptchuk goes on to say that “placebos provide relief, they rarely cure” (8). Since they provide some type of relief, placebos have similarities to therapeutic medicinal practices. Every prescription bottle full of pills, if purchased legally at a drug store, has a label on it describing possible side effects. Placebos, like medicine from a drug store, can have possible side effects. According to Cara Feinberg, who wrote about one of Ted Kaptchuk’s clinical trials, a study was done involving two hundred- seventy subjects who suffer from severe are pain with conditions such as carpal tunnel and tendinitis. During this study one third of the two hundred-seventy subjects complained of severe side effects. The rest of the patients claimed to have some relief. At the beginning of the study half of the subjects were given pills to ease the pain while the other half were given acupuncture treatment. The patients experiencing the side effects who got the pills began to feel drowsy, while the patients who had the acupuncture treatment …show more content…
According to Dr. Joe Dispenza, author of You Are the Placebo Making Your Mind Matter, to make the placebo effect work efficiently there are “three key elements: conditioning, expectation, and meaning” that work together to enforce a bodily or psychological response. Dr. Dispenza states that the first element, condition, is based upon past memory. A good example of this can be described using the commonly used drug, aspirin. Most people use aspirin for headaches or generally anything that is causing the slightest bit of discomfort. We have used this drug so many times that when we see this familiar pill our brain recognizes the relief of pain that follows indulging it. We have done this so many times that if we replaced the aspirin pill with a pill that looks the same but with no medical substance inside it, then our mind has been conditioned to relieve some of the pain of our headache (Dispenza). Another way the placebo effect works is through the second element discussed by Dr. Dispenza, expectation. W. Grant Thompson, MD wrote the book The Placebo Effect and Health in which he discusses an experiment with pharmacy students showing that expectation helps with the placebo effect. In this experiment, the students were given pills of four different colors telling the students that each color helped with something. For example, the blue pill was said