The Placebo effect and its possible implications

“Despite the problem of bias and hazards of interpretation and the claims about the efficacy of ancient remedies, we propose that the available data support the somewhat startling hypothesis that the history of medical treatment under recently is largely the history of the placebo effect.” - Shapiro and Shapiro (1997) in Anne Harrington, Ed. The Placebo Effect and Interdisciplinary Exploration. 

For those that don't know, a placebo is basically an ineffectual treatment that is passed off as an effective one. So the whole idea behind the placebo effect is that the body is capable of fixing and healing itself and that we don't always need medications to make us better.

To digress a bit, I'm sure you've heard your teachers say, "Your heartbeat is involuntary since it is controlled by involuntary cardiac muscle." Now here's the problem with that, we can actually regulate, to a certain extent, involuntary processes in our body such as our heartbeat. Similarly, if we need to go to the bathroom, but there's no bathroom available, we tell our bladder to hold up for a bit until you find a bathroom, even though our bladder is made of involuntary smooth muscle. So where am I going with this? Well, let's ask ourselves a question... why do we take medications? 

We take medications to help us feel better over things we say we can't consciously control. But what if there is a way to consciously regulate these 'involuntary' processes? Take an experiment conducted by Karen Olness, M.D.: Olness took a group of children and taught them all about antibodies, like IgA, in their saliva. He then taught them self-hypnosis (form of self-regulation) and suggested they increase their IgA levels. The group of children that were taught about IgA had an increase in the number of salivary IgA's compared to the control group (for more info refer to this abstract: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2642622 for more information).Using the same concept, if we show patients their heart monitors, they can regulate their heartbeat to have a better rate. In other words, if we show the monitor to a person who's heartbeat is too fast, they will eventually slow their heartbeat and bring it under control. This concept is called biofeedback. 

So basically, we can control our Autonomic Nervous System through cognitive function. If we can master the art of placebo's, there will be serious implications in the future. For instance, we can use placebo's for Parkinson's disease. In this disease, there is a decreased amount of dopamine, which results in decreased motor-control which is why Perkinson's causes tremors. However, by using hypnosis, similar to the experiment Olness conducted, scientists can increase the amount of dopamine in the dopamine pathway and thereby cause these tremors to go away. What a strange yet wonderful nature of placebos!