Owww! A little girl wails after falling and bumping her knee. Her father rushes over and inspects the leg. “I'll kiss it and make it better,” he says. The kiss works. The girl sniffles, wipes her eyes, then jumps up and gets back to playing. Her pain is forgotten.
Scenes like this one happen on playgrounds and in homes around the world every day. When a child gets a bump or bruise in Germany, says Ulrike Bingel, “someone will blow the pain away.”
A caring adult can seemingly stop a child's pain with a puff of air, a kiss or even just a few kind words. Of course, none of these things can repair injured skin. So what's happening? Doctors call it the placebo effect. It describes what happens when something that should no effect triggers a real, positive change in someone's body.
Placebos are a very important part of medical research. To prove that a new medicine works, researchers must show that people taking it improve more than people getting a placebo. This placebo is usually a pill that looks the same as the treatment but contains no medicine. At times a person may feel better after taking a placebo pill, even though the pill did not act on any disease or symptoms.
This placebo response isn't an illusion. It comes from the brain. A placebo effect can only influence body processes that the brain can modify, such as pain or digestion.
Kathryn Hall, a medical researcher in Boston says, “Placebos don't do anything for bacteria, but they can change how strongly someone experiences pain or other symptoms.” Other researchers are also trying to figure out why the placebo effect works. Ted Kaptchuk's group has discovered that placebo treatments work better when a doctor spends more quality time with a patient.
