💡 "Patients given a placebo after knee surgery reported the same pain relief as those who received real surgery."
Have you ever taken medicine and felt better very quickly — perhaps too quickly?
Do you think the mind has the power to heal the body? Can you think of any examples?
If a sugar pill could cure your headache, would it matter that it contains no medicine?
Should doctors be allowed to prescribe placebos without telling patients?
Can you think of situations in everyday life where belief alone changes the outcome?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z03FQGlGgo0
TED-Ed — Emma Bryce, "The power of the placebo effect" (2016, ~4.5 minutes).
✍️ Open Cloze — Fill in the gaps with ONE word only (from the video transcript)
In 1996, fifty-six volunteers (1) _ _ _ _ _ part in a study to test a new painkiller called Trivaricaine. On each subject, one index finger was covered in the new painkiller while the other (2) _ _ _ _ _ untouched. Then, both were squeezed in painful clamps. The subjects reported that the treated finger hurt less than the untreated one. This shouldn't be surprising, (3) _ _ _ _ _ Trivaricaine wasn't actually a painkiller, just a fake concoction with no pain-easing properties at all.
Doctors have used the term placebo (4) _ _ _ _ _ the 1700s, when they realized the power of fake drugs to improve people's symptoms. These were administered when proper drugs weren't available, or if someone imagined they were ill. In fact, the word placebo means "I shall please" (5) _ _ _ _ _ Latin, hinting at a history of placating troubled patients. Placebos had to mimic the real treatments in (6) _ _ _ _ _ to be convincing, so they took the form of sugar pills, water-filled injections, and even sham surgeries.
(7) _ _ _ _ _ , doctors realized that duping people in this way had another use: in clinical trials. (8) _ _ _ _ _ the 1950s, researchers were using placebos as a standard tool to test new treatments. To evaluate a new drug, half the patients in a trial might receive the real pill. The other half would (9) _ _ _ _ _ a placebo that looked the same. Since patients wouldn't know whether they'd received the real thing or a (10) _ _ _ _ _ , the results wouldn't be biased, researchers believed.
