Reverse Placebo Effect

I wonder if there is such a thing as the reverse placebo effect, where you give someone a real drug but tell them it's a placebo that won't have any effect.The reason I'm wondering is because I have a minor but annoying condition affecting stamina for which doctors have, over the years, prescribed a number of different medicines, none of which have had any effect. But it occurred to me today that perhaps some of them did have an effect, but not a big one, but because I've become pessimistic that doctors will find something that works that my ability to detect any improvement is impaired.--Percy

placebos work even if you tell the patient he is taking a placebo so my guess is not maybe a smaller effect of the placebo effect every pill has but still an effect

Once you get a negative schema (in this case about the efficacy of your meds) you filter will out positive information about you stamina levels (a bit like the comfirmation bias, really).Of course it could just be the drugs don't work. Trying keeping a graph of your stamina against differing meds: that's a longditudinal undertaking but it's the best way to find out for your self.As an aside one interpretation of the Hawthorne effect would say that you will feel better for making the graph of your stamina.Funny thing, psychology.

What makes me laugh is that the Placebo effect has a dose effect.

...Edited by Panda, : Cancelled post. Needs more thought.

How would you measure stamina objectively?

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

Not really. It works if you give them a it's a sugar pill but tell them that studies have down it's effective for their condition among a group pre-selected for their desire to take part in an experiment on the mind-body connection.

Hypothetically? Oxygen saturation of the blood.Practically? Number of star jumps you can do in a specified amount of time.

Wouldn't that depend more on how you "feel" at the time - i.e. on your psychological stamina instead of your physical stamina? Isn't that just the placebo effect all over again?

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"I'm Rory Bellows, I tell you! And I got a lot of corroborating evidence... over here... by the throttle!"

Yeah, but I did say it would be a longitudinal study. You would be looking to identify a trend.Not very practical but you could do it.

by some peoples' estimation, a good portion of any drug's effectiveness is caused by the placebo reaction. there's also a "no-cebo" effect, where negative reactions can be caused by a similar mechanic. i suppose if you combined the two, it'd be quite possible.personally, and this is purely anecdotal of course, i find that many things that work entirely off the placebo reaction have little or no effect on me. i often require real medication, especially pain medication, in significantly higher doses, and more frequently (my dentist hates me). and being a former member of pentecostal-type churches, none of their antics ever did anything to me.i'd actually be somewhat interested in throwing myself into various double-blind placebo tests just to see if this is the effect you postulate above, or if i'm just immune or something.

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Percy writes:

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I wonder if there is such a thing as the reverse placebo effect, where you give someone a real drug but tell them it's a placebo that won't have any effect.

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Interesting, but that presumes a placebo effect.It turns out that there is no such thing. The problem is that testing for a placebo effect requires three groups: One that receives treatment, one that receives a placebo, and one that receives no treatment at all, just observation. Most studies only do the first two. Thus, since they have no control for placebo compared to doing nothing, they have no way to determine if what happened is a "placebo effect" or if it's just what you would normally expect to have happen if nothing was done at all.Well, a survey of those studies that did actually do all three groups was done and the results are that there is no such thing as a "placebo effect." Taking a placebo had no significant difference from doing nothing. The only effect that had any significance was that those taking placebo reported slightly less pain than those only being observed.Pill Popping: Debunking the power of the placebo effect.So since there doesn't seem to be a placebo effect, it stands to reason that there is no converse to it.

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Rrhain

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Thank you for your submission to Science. Your paper was reviewed by a jury of seventh graders so that they could look for balance and to allow them to make up their own minds. We are sorry to say that they found your paper "bogus," specifically describing the section on the laboratory work "boring." We regret that we will be unable to publish your work at this time.

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Minds are like parachutes. Just because you've lost yours doesn't mean you can use mine.

And this from Wiki...

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Since the publication of Henry K. Beecher's The Powerful Placebo in 1955 the phenomenon has been considered to have clinically important effects. This view was notably challenged when in 2001 a systematic review of clinical trials concluded that there was no evidence of clinically important effects, except perhaps in the treatment of pain and continuous subjective outcomes. The article received a flurry of criticism, but the authors later published a Cochrane review with similar conclusions (updated as of 2010[update]). Most studies have attributed the difference from baseline till the end of the trial to a placebo effect, but the reviewers examined studies which had both placebo and untreated groups in order to distinguish the placebo effect from the natural progression of the disease.

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I do not see the confidence that you are giving to the non-existence of the placebo effect.
Instead, I see scientists continuing to do research, and discussing contradictory results.

I think people vary widely as to how suggestible they are. You sound somewhat like me. Every once in a while at work I accidentally get decaf instead of regular coffee, and within 15 minutes I know I made a mistake. A long time ago when I traveled regularly between college and home I would buy cokes every now and then to keep me awake. One time I could only get a Ho-Jo cola, and 15 minutes later when nothing was happening I pulled over to read the ingredients and discovered that it had no caffeine. I used to think headache pills were headache pills and didn't care what brand I pulled out of the cabinet, and it took some years before I realized that when the headache didn't go away that it was Tylenol I'd taken, which apparently has no effect on me (I used to think this was really weird, but when I finally did mention it to my doctor he said that it wasn't really that uncommon).So I feel like I have enough evidence to conclude that I know when something is having an effect on me and when it isn't, but now with my failure to find any medicine that works for my stamina condition I'm beginning to wonder if my pessimism that something will eventually work is preventing me from detecting when something does have some positive effect.I think it would be possible to study the reverse placebo effect. For example, two groups would both be given headache pills, but one would be told they were headache pills, and the other would be told they were placebos and be provided some reasonable-sounding explanation (but not the real one) for why they were telling them they were giving them placebos.Someone mentioned the difficulty in studying effects on stamina, and I agree. Stamina is affected by many factors, including how much sleep you've had, how much you've eaten, what you've eaten, what time of day you exercise, how long since the last exercise, etc. Sometimes I just have wonderful days stamina-wise, but I can never find anything to point to. I've been great with a lot of sleep and no sleep, in the morning and at night, after days of rest and with only one day of rest. The only thing that is clearly a factor is dieting. The specific foods I eat don't seem to make much difference, but any decrease in caloric intake such as occurs on a diet dramatically affects my stamina.--Percy

caffeine does little or nothing to me -- except that i'm hopelessly addicted to it. i decided consciously a few years back to drop all soda from my diet, and drink only water from then on. a week a later, i discovered that i could no longer function because of the migraines. i had initially believed -- rather firmly, i might add -- that there would be no actual difference. tylenol typically does nothing for me, either. i find that food and sleep work significantly better for curing headaches, as compared to four or five tylenol. which is about the dosage i was up to before i gave up even trying to make it work for me. advil (or ibuprofren) seems to help though.i once was prescribed percocet by a dentist after dental surgery. i didn't finish the little bottle, because i discovered that gum pain was better than extreme dizziness and gum pain. (i now tell hospitals that i'm "allergic" to it.) as i mentioned, my dentist hates working on me, whenever i need a filling or whatever. i take about two and half times the normal injection of local anesthetic, and it generally wears off in about the time it take to kick in for normal people. i could forward you some of my spam. potentially. i sort of suspect that, or perhaps sketicism, gets in the way of a proper, normal placebo reaction. well, as mentioned above, people can be given placebos, told they're placebos, and have it still work. i think the secret is to grind it up and put in their food -- so they're unaware they've even taken the medication. of course, this potentially runs afoul of some ethical concerns...

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