The placebo effect is honestly pretty wild. There’s a common false understanding that placebo = scam, but if you can achieve a therapeutic effect via thinking that you’re going to achieve a therapeutic effect, then… cool!!
The opposite is also true, called the “nocebo” effect. I’ve noticed this in the OR a lot depending on our anesthesiologist, specifically when they’re administering the propofol (the IV drug that knocks you out). Unfortunately it’s an irritant, so I’ve seen a few different approaches to try to get ahead of the sensation of pain, including warnings like “This can hurt initially - that’s normal!” but I think tends to backfire, cuz you’ve just set the expectation of pain, and those patients seem to have a much heightened experience of pain. This is opposed to saying things like “You might feel a warm sensation in your IV” which seem to reduce the nocebo effect.
It’d be cool to do a study on this action specifically.
The last time I had general anesthesia, they didn’t give me any warnings but I had this weird prickly warm sensation in my crotch just before things went dark and I hated it but it’s like just gotta bear it for a few seconds until I’m out.
I’d take that memory with a grain of salt. Part of the anesthesic effect is that you don’t remember shit. A common concern patients voice when they roll into the OR is “shouldn’t I be asleep for this? I’ve had X# surgeries before and I’ve never been awake for this part…” But they probably said the same thing on their second+ surgery: you’re always awake when you roll into the OR, you just don’t remember the few minutes leading up to going to sleep cuz of the drugs.
That said, some people do have a resistance to some part of the effect: you might have been one of them, and are remembering traces of the experience like the pain of the propofol; but where that pain occurred could have gotten blocked out, so your brain just picked a spot.
Unless they placed your IV near your crotch, which would be super, super abnormal.
But yea I wouldn’t put much trust in the accuracy of memories immediately surrounding general anesthesia. It fucks with your brain, hard.
Me: Brain, settle the fuck down
Brain: FUCK YOU I WON’T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME
Me: (takes stimulant)
Brain:
Now that’s a placebo meme I can work with.
The placebo effect also works even if you know its a placebo… Though sometimes I wonder if that information is in itself some kind of benevolent false information campaign to create a second layer of placebo effect around placebos. A placebo effect of the placebo effect working even if you know about it as it were.
The power of ritual
Accurate.
But it does have an effect. It’s called the Placebo Effect.
The placebo affect is what the comment is describing, it’s not an additional effect. And it’s more a product of your cognition - your expectations, than the more biological effect of an actual drug on brain chemistry.
Well yeah, that’s obvious. I’m being cheeky about the fact that they chose the one word that is shared with the name for what it was describing.
Could have been “takes a sugar pill” or “takes a pill with no medical properties”, but they landed on “effect”.
Strictly speaking, taking the pill does indeed produce an effect. Just not through the traditional means.
