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Underground > Laboratory >

Is there a reverse Placebo Effect?

06:53 / 02.10.02

So I was thinking, we all know of the placebo effect, right? That is, if a doctor proscribes a patient a sugar pill but tells the patient that the pill is instead some strong medicine then there is a higher chance that the patient's condition will improve.

However does there exist an opposite effect?

Imagine the following experiment. There are two groups of patients all of which suffer from oh let's say skin problems. One group (group A) is given a placebo while the other group (group B) is given medicine that is known to be effective. However, one of the patients from group B is a "plant". In other words he is secretly working for the researchers. He whispers to the other patients that he's been in such a study before and that he knows that the medicine tastes different from the placebo and judging from past experience he knows that everyone in group B has been given a placebo. Now say the effectiveness of the drug given to group B is 75%. Will the effectiveness of the drug, now with the patients doubting that it will work, decrease or will it stay the same?

Has such a study been done? If so what was the outcome?

tom-karika nukes it from orbit

10:23 / 02.10.02

Here is an experiment, which i found on this this Page:

6. A reverse placebo effect

It is possible to induce a negative placebo effect.
Here is an experiment you could try on a friend if you are feeling a little cruel ;-).

Wait until a friend in work drinks a cup of tea. Say to him. "you didn't use THAT water did you? They found a rotting pigeon in the tank. The last person to use water from THAT tap was off sick for a week" Within a short time the poor guy who drank the perfectly normal, healthy and wholesome water will be feeling unwell! You have just turned a harmless cup of tea into a negative placebo.

Of course, this is more along the line of the placebo having a bad effect, rather than a real drug having no effect. This page documents an old story where a man was given an anti-cancer drug, which mysteriously stopped working when media coverage suggested it shouldn't.

This was only with one person. Imagine if the the papers suddenly published evidence that aspirin was in fact just a placebo. Would you have a drop in it's effectiveness? A nationwide headache epidemic?

10:49 / 02.10.02

Three points:

First off - placebo is basically defined (everywhere I have looked) as a medicine with no physiological reason for its effect. It appears that this is also always assumed to be a good effect.

Secondly - I can see a 'reverse placebo' having one of two sources:
(i) A negative effect which has no physiological reason. This would be, to my mind, a true negative placebo effect.
(ii) A reduced or entirely negated placebo effect. So assume for the sake of argument that asprin has 90% of its effect from real physiological causes, and 10% from everybody believing it will be good. If you remove that 10% it's not a reverse placebo, so much as a nil-placebo.

Thirdly - placebo comes from the latin for "I shall be acceptable" and is used in Roman Catholicism to describe the service or office of vespers for the dead. And not a lot of people know that.

12:42 / 02.10.02

Not sure what's meant by "reverse placebo" here. All placebo effects (and therefore a large part of many orthodox medical treatments) stem from suggestibility - so it'd be quite possible to suggest a negative or adverse effect and increase the chances of that effect occurring. It's also perfectly possible for placebo effects to be undermined; the media, with its black-and-white dramatising of 'miracle drugs gone bad' does just that.

In the classic studies of belief modification, it's been found that one is more likely to accept a particular piece of information (eg. 'this drug will cure you') if the provider of that information is seen as an 'expert'. (There are a host of other factors influencing whether 'facts' are or are not assimilated.) Given the gradual but persistent erosion of faith in doctors and scientists generally, I wonder whether those experiments would produce the same results today...

15:49 / 02.10.02

Probably not I'd suspect!

I have read of the nocebo effect (which I think comes from the Latin nocere, to wound, though doubtless Haus will correct me if I am wrong). It's a pretty old term, used by anthropologists to explain why people become ill when someone casts a spell on them. According to some, it can be fatal, though I'm sure posters here would not want to dismiss magick in such a way, especially if the victim never knew about the curse. Anyway, if you Google the words: Cannon, Voodoo, Death you will get a load of refs to Cannon's 1949 article on it, and some more way out stuff about terrorism and AIDs / HIV which is worth a look.