Would a placebo still work if the doctor or pharmacist told the patient that It was a placebo?

That’s the strange thing about placebos. They still work when the doctor tells the patient that he is prescribing sugar pills. I don’t know how that works. It’s a mystery for medical experts to figure ou.

Placebos work in at least a third of patients, and sometimes up to 60%.
Medicalnewstoday.com

So you think the placebo effect is weird…

If a doctor gives a patient Narcan (naloxone – the antidote to morphine) believing it to to be morphine and tells the patient its morphine the patient will experience the same level of pain relief as if they had been given morphine.

Which could solve a lot of problems but is ethically a bit suspect. People get amusinlgy upset when you lie to them….

I believe in the placebo effect, but I don’t believe that it would work if the patient knows it’s a placebo. I don’t know of any situation in which a doctor would tell a patient that, unless the person was in a study and knew there was a chance they might get the placebo.

Placebos work because the person taking them thinks it’s an actual medication. That’s the whole point.

EDIT: I just found a study which says: “A study led by Kaptchuk and published in Science Translational Medicine explored this by testing how people reacted to migraine pain medication. One group took a migraine drug labeled with the drug’s name, another took a placebo labeled “placebo,” and a third group took nothing. The researchers discovered that the placebo was 50% as effective as the real drug to reduce pain after a migraine attack.”

“The researchers speculated that a driving force beyond this reaction was the simple act of taking a pill. “People associate the ritual of taking medicine as a positive healing effect,” says Kaptchuk. “Even if they know it’s not medicine, the action itself can stimulate the brain into thinking the body is being healed.””

https://www.health.harvard.edu/mental-health/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect

Interesting!

Also interesting: “The opposite, the nocebo effect, can also have real effects, where negative thoughts about a treatment can make it not work as well.”

The “placebo effect” is very simple. Your body has the ability to fight most things that are wrong with it. But if your mind is convinced it can’t and needs help, then your immune system will not work as effectively. So if you are given a pill that has no medicinal value at all and are told it is a panacea for what is wrong with you complete with success stories, you believe it and your immune system kicks in to work “with it”. If you told the person it was a placebo they may believe you or they may not. But I would think it wouldn’t work as well.

No. I wouldn’t believe so.

Physicians may use placebos for diagnosis or treatment only if the patient is informed and agrees to its use.

@Forever_Free very true but being informed defeats the point and if done correctly the physician wouldn’t know they’ve given the patient a placebo. For example in a double blind trial where neither the anaesthetist or the patient knew what had been given paracetamol (acetaminophen) gave better pain relief than morphine for post operative pain. But when the anaesthetist knows what they have given morphine gave better pain relief. And if the patient was told they had been given paracetamol then they still experienced significant pain.

Which puts us in a difficult position. If I lie to you I can treat your pain quickly, safely and cheaply. If I tell the truth the Sackler family make more money and you risk becoming addicted to opioids.

@Lightlyseared I understand the concept. I also worked for a CRE before where they did blind and double blinded studies.
My point is that the patient needs to be aware at all times.

@Forever_Free I agree but then the patient never is never fully informed are they. To go back to the Sacklers and oxycodone, how many doctors who prescribed oxycodone mentioned that they had chosen to prescribe that over something else not because they thought it was the best choice for the patient but because the company rep had taken them out for a nice meal the day before. There’s a significant amount of evidence stating patients weren’t informed how addictive it was and more to the point that the doctors that were prescribing were not aware either.
Thousands of patients are prescribed statins and are told that it will reduce their risk of heart disease but are never informed there is no actual evidence that is the case. There is only evidence they reduce cholesterol when you test for it and we hope thats a good thing but we don’t actually know.
Patients are prescribed new (and obviously more expensive) antihypertension medications that are more effective at lowering blood pressure (the thing doctors care about) without informing them that they are actually less effective at preventing death from the complications of high blood pressure (the thing patients care about) than older antihypertension medications,

@Lightlyseared I am not going to fight the FDA or the National Institutes of Health. Let me know how that goes.