The Placebo Effect
Harry
S Wanted to quit smoking. So, when he saw an ad for a study on ways to break
the habit, he called and offered to be part of it. The study was at local
university, were Harry and other volunteers – all of them people who
wanted to stop smoking – were divided into three groups. The
volunteers in Group A received nicotine gum. Nicotine is tobacco.[1]
It is what gives smokers the good feeling they get from smoking. When these
smokers felt the need for a cigarette, they could chew a piece of this gum instead. It would give them the nicotine
they were used to. The volunteers in Group B, including Harry, got some gum,
too. It was just plain chewing gum, but the volunteers did not know that. The
people in Group C got nothing. A group like this in a study is called the control
group.
After
a four-hour period without cigarettes, Harry and the other volunteers had to
write answers to set of questions. Their
answers showed how much they wanted a cigarette at that point. Not surprisingly,
the smokers in Group C-the group that got no gum-showed the strongest cravings.[2]
The smokers in the other two groups did not feel such a strong need to smoke.
What
surprised the researchers was that the result for Groups A and B were exactly the
same. That meant that the plain chewing gum worked as well as the gum with
nicotine. Why ? The researchers say, “Maybe it was the placebo effect.” In
other words, the smokers in Group B BELIEVED
that the gum would help them feel better, so they did feel better.
A
placebo is something that seems like a medical treatment but does not
contain any real medicine The word placebo
means “ I will please” in Latin. The purpose of a placebo is to please a
patient who doesn’t really need medicine but wants some Doctors have given placebos
to patients in situations like these
for hundreds of years . If the patient then feels better, the doctor may say it
is because of the placebo effect.
Not
everyone believes that the placebo effect exist, but researchers in Houston,
Texas, have found some interesting evidence[3]
for it. They did a study on a certain type of knee operation. A lot of people
have this operation – about 350.000 a year- and it is expensive, costing about
$5,000. They study showed that a fake
operation worked just as well as the real thing ! There were 180 volunteers in
the study, and they understood that they might get a real operation or they
might not. The ones who had fake surgery[4]
got only three small cuts around their knee. After two weeks, most patients
believed that their surgery was real. Later, 35-40% of all patients reported
that their knees felt better. The numbers were the same for those who had a
real operation and those who had the “placebo surgery.”
Some
researchers think that the placebo effect works only in a very few situations,
possibly only in the case of pain. They have an idea how the placebo effect
works in cases like these. According to some recent studies, when
patients believe they are receiving treatment, their brains produce these when
a person expects pain to go away. The brain’s own painkillers then can help block the pain.
Both
the smokers in Harry’s group and the fake surgery patients felt less pain than
expected. Something happened that helped them feel better. Maybe the idea that
they were getting treatment ( a supply of nicotine or an operation) produced
painkillers in their brains. Or perhaps something else was happening. For
example, maybe the sugar in the chewing gum helped Harry and the others in his
group feel better. Scientist agree that further research is needed. So far,
no one has really proven that the
placebo effect exist.
Sumber Bacaan : Password 2 (A
Reading and Vocabulary Text) page : 166-167 by Linda Butler
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