Pursuing the placebo effect: What exactly is it?

The use of placebo has been associated by patients with trickery or losing out, but some researchers are looking for something about it that can be harnessed to heal.

By Victoria Stagg Elliott, AMNews staff. Dec. 20, 2004.

The placebo-controlled trial long has been the standard-bearer that provides the comparison point by which a medical intervention, particularly a drug, can be deemed to work or not.

Increasingly, though, researchers are considering the value of placebo on an entirely different level, asking whether something can be learned from the fact that beneficial effects are sometimes seen in subjects taking dummy pills and if this occurrence can somehow be translated into improved medical care.

"The placebo response is important -- not because we're going to treat people with placebo, because that would be unethical -- but if we can find out what it is about placebos that helps people get better, we can try to apply it more broadly," said Andrew Leuchter, MD, professor and vice chair of the Dept. of Psychiatry at the Neuropsychiatric Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published several papers documenting differences between the brains of patients with depression who respond to placebo and those who don't.

The National Institutes of Health is funding several studies related to the placebo effect, including Dr. Leuchter's, but the agency is asking questions beyond simply how and why it happens. The NIH also is funding studies to divine ways physicians can actually use this phenomenon in practice. The NIH's National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine is leading the charge in this research, although most of the other institutes have some interest, too.