Placebo Effects Prove the Value of Suggestion

by Charles E. Henderson, Ph.D.
Placebo 1. A substance with no medicinal properties which causes a patient to improve because of his belief in its efficacy. 2. (Experimental) A substance administered to a control group in an experiment in which the experimental group receives a drug in order to eliminate the effect of the act of administering the drug.
—Wolman, Dictionary of Behavioral Science
Could a little bit of sugar keep you from catching colds, cure a skin disease, or even make a cancer disappear? Make you drunk? All of these (and much, much more) have been reported as "placebo" effects in the scientific literature. In fact, there is hardly any human characteristic or problem that has not been shown to be affected by placebos in one research or other.

A placebo, as used in research, is an inactive substance or procedure used as a control in an experiment. A placebo effect occurs when the placebo, which cannot on its own merit have any affect, does in fact have the same or similar affect as the experimental substance or procedure.
For example, consider the body of research that has been conducted on human response times as affected by alcohol. Subjects are given measured doses of alcohol at certain time intervals and their responses are tested following each "drink." But to make sure nothing else is causing any of the changes that may occur, it is necessary to have a "control" group. This is a group of subjects for whom everything is identical except one thing: in this case, they get no alcohol. They are treated the same way and they are given a beverage which they believe to be alcohol under the same conditions and with the same schedule.
In other words you take a group of subjects and do the same thing for all of them, except half of the group (unbeknown to anyone except the researchers) get a non-alcoholic beverage.
As you might expect, those subjects who receive alcohol begin, at some point, to show a change in their responses. And of course given enough of the alcoholic beverage many of them get plastered.
What you might find surprising, though, if you are not familiar with this research, is that some of the placebo-drinking subjects—those receiving shots of a liquid prepared to taste and kick like alcohol, but which in fact is basically just water—acted tipsy and sometimes even drunk. These subjects for whom the suggestion of drinking alcohol produced inebriated-like behavior were exhibiting a placebo effect.
Placebo effects are of particular interest to us here because they are another phenomenon that illustrates the strength of suggestion. These placebo effects frequently demonstrate a potency of suggestion which we normally think of as residing only in drugs.
The placebo effect has been reported in just about every research situation in which placebos were used, and in many circumstances where the use of placebos was not intended but the effect was the same anyway.

Placebo Effects Prove the Value of Suggestion