Are you a placebo responder?
Many respond to placebos, but it can be difficult to predict which symptoms, which treatments and under what conditions you will respond best.
Scientifically speaking, it’s likely that you are a placebo responder.
The question is: How well do you respond, and for which symptoms?
Often when people learn the potential of placebos to relieve symptoms, they question whether placebo treatments are effective for everyone. The scientific answer is yes. Placebo responsiveness is present in everyone, but it is not present in every treatment. Your brain’s placebo response is a scientifically established component of many prescription medicines, over the counter medicines, and nutritional supplements. You routinely experience your own placebo response without even noticing.
The first requirement to activate a placebo response in the brain is the person’s participation in treatment. Without treatment, there is nothing to trigger the brain’s placebo response.
The higher an individual’s placebo response, the more effective any treatment can be.
When you start a placebo treatment, your placebo response can be measured by tracking progress over time. Regardless of whether you know the treatment is a placebo or not, your awareness of the treatment provides a starting- and end-point to measure effectiveness.
Placebo treatments can be powerful. The higher the placebo response, the more effective the treatment. Some drugs and nutritional supplements deliver as much as 80% placebo response in some people while other treatments deliver less than 20%. This variability has been linked to the symptom being treated, the treatment itself and the many components of a particular treatment ritual.
Even in double-blind studies of drugs, where neither the patient nor the investigator knows which patients receive the placebo, we can not suppress the placebo response.
While we can observe a person’s physiological placebo response using real-time imaging of the human brain, it is more difficult to measure a given placebo’s potency in the same way we can measure the dosage of a drug. That’s because the effectiveness of many medicines is a blurry line between the active ingredient in the medicine and the placebo response of the patient during the treatment.
Even in double-blind studies of drugs, where neither the patient nor the investigator knows which patients receive the placebo, we can not suppress the placebo response in the patient that receives the actual drug being studied. Instead, at the end of the investigation, we subtract the placebo patient responses from the response of the patients who received the drug. We compare the difference and if the difference is great enough, we conclude the drug is effective.
Think of the effectiveness of medicine as the total positive effect of the medicine itself plus the positive effect of the patient’s placebo response. Some treatments deliver as high as 80% placebo response, and other treatments deliver less than 20% placebo response. This variability depends on the symptom being treated, the treatment itself and the many components of the treatment ritual, including the patient herself.
Measure your placebo response by investigating it yourself.
The question of whether you are a placebo responder is answered in the same way as it is answered in clinical studies. You can respond to placebos, but it is difficult to predict which symptoms, which treatments and under what conditions you will respond best.
You can measure your placebo response by investigating it yourself. To do that, you simply need a symptom to treat, a placebo treatment that will be focused on your symptom, and optionally another treatment to compare with the placebo treatment.
Some studies show that women are better placebo responders than men. Other studies show men are better responders than women. There are also several recent studies that show placebo conditioning over time can increase placebo response when a person continues a placebo treatment after some level of success.
Ritual is key.
Several recent studies show that placebo conditioning over time can increase placebo response
Placebo research spans decades, but placebo treatments are a new frontier.
Although placebo research spans decades, the intentional fostering of the placebo response is a new frontier in medicine. It offers the opportunity to enable healing without the drawbacks and side-effects of the pharmaceuticals currently used to heal many common symptoms. We are passionate about empowering you to explore this new area in all its potential.
We encourage you to investigate and learn more about your own placebo response by focusing on any of your symptoms and conditions that respond to placebo treatments.
Placebo and You
If you are curious about your placebo response, a brief google search about the placebo response will yield a variety of medical studies and articles to help you dig deeper.
At Nubellum Research, we are curating and publishing the latest research on the efficacy of the placebo response for common symptoms like anxiety, depression, pain, and insomnia. We’ve also developed a complete placebo treatment system to make it easier to investigate and activate your placebo response.
