Having faith in your medication increases the chance of it working, researchers have found.
They say a patient’s attitude can directly affect how well a drug works – or whether it works at all. Though often dismissed as mere wishful thinking, the so-called ‘placebo effect’, where patients derive benefits from dummy drugs, is very real. But a sceptical outlook can cause an ailment to linger. The Oxford and Cambridge university researchers looked at how people’s attitudes affected a drug’s effects. Twenty-two young men were hooked up to a drip of remifentinal, a powerful morphine-like drug, while a heated rod was attached to their calf. The temperature was adjusted so the men rated the pain equally and, without telling the participants, the drip was started. This lead to the average initial pain rating of 66 going down to 55, the journal Science Translational Medicine reports. When the men were then told the drip was being started, despite the dose being the same, their perception of the pain fell to an average of 39. (Daily Mail)