Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School studies placebos | Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2013

Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School studies placebos | Harvard Magazine Jan-Feb 2013

TWO WEEKS INTO Ted Kaptchuk’s first randomized clinical drug trial, nearly a third of his 270 subjects complained of awful side effects. All the patients had joined the study hoping to alleviate severe arm pain: carpal tunnel, tendinitis, chronic pain in the elbow, shoulder, wrist. In one part of the study, half the subjects received pain-reducing pills; the others were offered acupuncture treatments. And in both cases, people began to call in, saying they couldn’t get out of bed. The pills were making them sluggish, the needles caused swelling and redness; some patients’ pain ballooned to nightmarish levels. “The side effects were simply amazing,” Kaptchuk explains; curiously, they were exactly what patients had been warned their treatment might produce. But even more astounding, most of the other patients reported real relief, and those who received acupuncture felt even better than those on the anti-pain pill. These were exceptional findings: no one had ever proven that acupuncture worked better than painkillers. But Kaptchuk’s study didn’t prove it, either. The pills his team had given patients were actually made of cornstarch; the “acupuncture” needles were retractable shams that never pierced the skin. The study wasn’t aimed at comparing two treatments. It was designed to compare two fakes.

Although Kaptchuk, an associate professor of medicine, has spent his career studying these mysterious human reactions, he doesn’t argue that you can simply “think yourself better.” “Sham treatment won’t shrink tumors or cure viruses,” he says.

But researchers have found that placebo treatments—interventions with no active drug ingredients—can stimulate real physiological responses, from changes in heart rate and blood pressure to chemical activity in the brain, in cases involving pain, depression, anxiety, fatigue, and even some symptoms of Parkinson’s.

Iv-B deceptions can spread through a society causing long term illnesses, but also changes in attitudes leading to booms and busts. A placebo can also oscillate between a floor and ceiling, after first use the placebo effect increases until it reaches a crisis level where the fake effects are exposed. In the same way euphoria in the markets might cause a boom until they must confront reality and collapse. In a placebo effect there would be feedback loops where people are reacting to partially false information instead of reality like in Chinese Whispers.