Hip
Senior Member
- Messages
- 17,874
One or two interesting points are made in the following article:
Here's What Placebos Can Heal—And What They Can't
The article is an interview with biologist Erik Vance about his book Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal.
Some excerpts from the article:
So what Erik Vance seems to be saying is that the placebo effect involves dopaminergic effects, and so stands a good chance of working for diseases where dopamine is low, or for diseases where increasing dopamine may be helpful.
Here's What Placebos Can Heal—And What They Can't
The article is an interview with biologist Erik Vance about his book Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal.
Some excerpts from the article:
Do placebos and the power of the mind work?
What I’ve found is yes, but not with everything. There are rules and conditions in which healing can be incredibly effective. Parkinson’s, chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, depression, anxiety, certain types of asthma, and autoimmune deficiencies are all very placebo-responsive. But cancer is not.
Placebos have been particularly effective in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease. How do you explain that?
Parkinson’s is the perfect disease to talk about placebos. It is a chronic deficiency of dopamine, which is one of those brain chemicals that does a lot of jobs in our bodies. One of [dopamine’s] important roles is in reward processing: how we think about good things we might get in the future.
Expectation drives placebos. And dopamine is a chemical that’s very responsive to our expectations. Parkinson’s happens to be a deficiency in the very chemical that’s very important in placebo effects and rewards.
If you look at Alzheimer’s, which does not have a high placebo response, you start to see that there are rules at play when it comes to placebos. It’s not your brain magically doing all these crazy things. There are certain chemicals we have access to and others we don’t.
So what Erik Vance seems to be saying is that the placebo effect involves dopaminergic effects, and so stands a good chance of working for diseases where dopamine is low, or for diseases where increasing dopamine may be helpful.