Wednesday, March 23, 2005

Placebo

I was intrigued by this article on the New Scientist site. (Link stolen from Neil Gaiman.) The article lists thirteen current mysteries in science, most of which I'd already come across. The new one is the placebo effect. Everyone knows the basics of this - if you give someone morphine for pain relief, then replace it with saline, they still benefit as if they were receiving morphine. The normal explanation for this is something psychological. The interesting bit here is that if you add a drug that blocks morphine's effects to the placebo, the person does not experience pain relief - even though they don't know its there. There's something more complex going on here, and I'll look forward to seeing theories as to what.

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