The Placebo Effect

I was in primary school when I first encountered the concept of the placebo effect. I had read a book by Kornel Makuszynski, Panna z mokrą głową, or The Girl with a Wet Head in English. It took place in a village where a 13-year-old girl lived. There was a good-hearted doctor who had his own methods of curing poor peasant patients who could not afford medicine. He knew that these patients were malnourished, so he thought a good idea would be to push them to eat a bit better. He also thought that adding a bit of magic could help heal them. For a peasant, to eat a chicken was a festive luxury; it was not believed or considered to be a medicine. The doctor’s prescriptions were things such as catch a blackish hen at midnight, spit three times behind your left shoulder, kill the hen with a black-handled knife, expose its head in moonlight for the duration of one prayer, and so on. This is not the exact quotation, but it was something in this style. Sure enough, these treatments worked in most cases. Nowadays we have scientifically proven data showing that placebos work in up to 90% of cases.

After coming to Australia, I attended gatherings for new Polish immigrants. Such gatherings were always full of unusual stories about miracles resulting from Bayer aspirin, which at that time was not available in Poland. Everybody sent it to their families, and the embellished feedback was a really good laugh. My in-laws were a bit more demanding because the only medicine that could "save their lives" was a quite expensive prescription drug, that, when bought on a a regular basis, created a really big hole in the budget of a new migrant. The moment the drug appeared in Poland it lost its magical quality, and new demand for new magic appeared: Chinese remedies after we moved to Taiwan. This time I decided not to waste any more time or money. I went to a Chinese medicine shop and asked, “Please give me five different wellbeing remedies of the strangest shapes and smells.” I sent them to my in-laws, attached with detailed instructions of how to use them. They worked extremely well for any possible complaint.

…and regarding doctors. A doctor or a professor with a waiting list of 3 months or longer, charging the highest possible fees, is more likely to help us than a normal doctor, diagnosing the same sickness and prescribing the same drugs.

It is the dilemma of healers: to heal for free, like Jesus, or to set high fees that increase the placebo effect.

The most interesting thing I find out about the placebo effect was that it works even when patients who were given a placebo were told that they were given a placebo. It made me think that placebo research could be influenced or "contaminated" by the Hawthorne Effect, an experiment that proved that we perform better if we are given attention or placed under observation... or even if we think we are.