The sugar pill

About this video

In a test of a new headache pill, some people get the real pill and some get a sugar pill that looks exactly the same, and nobody is told which. Some of the people who took the sugar pill say their headache got better. A placebo is a dummy treatment: a sugar pill, or a cream or drink with nothing in it that should work on the illness, made to look, feel and taste like the real one. Feeling better after taking one is called the placebo effect.

What can it do? A large Cochrane review brought together more than 200 trials that compared people given a placebo with people given nothing at all. In general it found no important effects. In some trials a placebo made a difference to what people report about themselves, mostly pain and nausea, though the authors note that even this is hard to separate from people simply reporting what they expect. Things a doctor or a test can measure changed even less. There is no good evidence that a placebo heals an illness.

In 1955 the American doctor Henry Beecher wrote a famous paper saying placebos helped a large share of patients with many illnesses. Later, in 1997, two researchers read the studies he used again and found that most of those patients would have got better anyway: their illnesses were easing by themselves. His studies had no group that got nothing at all, so there was nothing to compare with. Much of what looks like getting better on a placebo is really natural recovery.

That is why many trials give the control group a placebo that looks the same as the real treatment, and keep everyone from knowing who got which, which is called blinding. Then hope, expectation and natural recovery are in both groups, and if the group on the real treatment does better, the difference can't be explained by them. This video explains the placebo effect on Knaph, from the Health Level 1 lesson The Placebo Effect.

Transcript

1. 0:00Two pills that look the same. One is real, one is sugar, and nobody is told which. Some people on the sugar pill say their headache got better.
2. 0:10A placebo is a dummy treatment, made to look like the real one. Feeling better after one is the placebo effect.
3. 0:19More than two hundred trials compared a placebo with nothing at all. In general, no important effects. Some on what people report, mostly pain and nausea. What tests measure changed even less.
4. 0:36In 1955, Henry Beecher said placebos helped a large share of patients. But most would have got better anyway. His studies had no group that got nothing.
5. 0:51So fair trials give the control group a look-alike, and nobody knows who got which. Hope, expectation and recovery are in both groups. Only the medicine is different.
6. 1:06It can change how you feel for a while. It doesn't heal.