This subject has come up in another thread but it deserves wider discussion
Don’t be discouraged by placebos - Cure Parkinson's
Don’t be discouraged by placebos
24 Replies
•
It cost $5 a month to read the article, but I'm guessing it says placebos are pretty effective. Do you think they sell placebos on Amazon? I'll take whatever works.
😂 lol
• in reply toMBAnderson
Sorry about that. To read this clear your cookies Then search on Google“power of placebos “ You should be able to find The Harvard paper in full halfway down page 1
MBAnderson• in reply to
No can do. Cookies make surfing easier.
Are you serious. Every time you open a page cookies are restored so deleting them will make your browser run faster and cleaner.If you have not deleted your cookies for 6 months or moe you may find your internet is running twice as fast.
Clean up your computer.
Do you have a pc or mac.
Don't know about macs
On a pc use cortana and search for disk cleanup run it and this will delete all unneeded files.
You may not want to delete all stored passwords unless you know them all. If you know them or have then written down just delete them.
If you are use Chrome for the internet go to settings and advanced, clear browser data, advanced check all boxes and set time to all time and clear all dats clear browser data
What ever browser you are using delete files and clean up your browser at least 1 time a week. I clean up files and clear browser data every day
My wife's computer had not been cleaned for a tear and it had 5 gigs of unneeded files it ran twice as fast after it was cleaned and i cleared the browser data.
Depends on whether or not you're talking about 1st party or third-party cookies as some make your computer run more efficiently.
If you delete your cookies when you open a web site the first time it will take about half second or less to reload all of the cookies for that site and then you are good to go this will happen every time you open a new page.
I registered at 2 locations today and the fields were automatically populated with my data, which matters for somebody who can't use a keyboard anymore. I consider that efficiency. As I said above, it depends on whether not were talking about 1st party or third-party cookies. I delete cookies, selectively.
Are you serious. Every time you open a page cookies are restored so deleting them will make your browser run faster and cleaner.If you have not deleted your cookies for 6 months or moe you may find your internet is running twice as fast.
Clean up your computer.
Do you have a pc or mac.
Don't know about macs
On a pc use cortana and search for disk cleanup run it and this will delete all unneeded files.
You may not want to delete all stored passwords unless you know them all. If you know them or have then written down just delete them.
If you are use Chrome for the internet go to settings and advanced, clear browser data, advanced check all boxes and set time to all time and clear all dats clear browser data
What ever browser you are using delete files and clean up your browser at least 1 time a week. I clean up files and clear browser data every day
My wife's computer had not been cleaned for a tear and it had 5 gigs of unneeded files it ran twice as fast after it was cleaned and i cleared the browser data.
Reply
park_bear• in reply to
I did the equivalent of clearing cookies - disabled them - and it made no difference. They still want five bucks a month for this unsourced opinion article. This sentence from it will suffice: "Now science has found that under the right circumstances, a placebo can be just as effective as traditional treatments."
I had just written in reply to someone else that I am reading You Are the Placebo by Dr Joe Dispenza. The brain is powerful - and so is placebo.
A placebo can work even when you know it’s a placebo
POSTED JULY 07, 2016, 9:30 AM
Mallika Marshall, MDMallika Marshall, MD
Contributing Editor
Follow me at @mallikamarshall
If your doctor told you that she was giving you a placebo and that it would help you, would you believe her? As it turns out, based on new research, maybe you should.
Placebos are often considered “fake” treatments. You may have heard them described as “sugar pills.” They usually take the form of pills, injections, or even entire procedures that are used in clinical trials to test “real” treatments. For example, one group of study participants is given an active drug and another group is given a placebo, which looks exactly like the active medication but is completely inactive. The participants can’t tell whether they’re getting the fake drug or the real drug. The researchers wait to see if the people taking the real one do better (or worse) than those taking the fake one.
To complicate matters, there is a documented “placebo effect,” which means that some people actually respond to a placebo even though it shouldn’t have an effect on the body. This has been thought to be largely due to their beliefs or expectations that they are getting the real treatment and not the fake one. But what if people were told, up-front, that they were getting a placebo and not an active medication? It stands to reason the placebo would have no effect. Right?
Wrong.
What an “open-label placebo” can do for you
Dr. Ted J. Kaptchuk, a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and director of the Harvard-wide Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPS) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has been studying placebos for more than 20 years. His most recent work on these “open-label placebos,” as they’re called, is fascinating. I had a chance to interview him in person earlier this year.
In one study, Kaptchuk looked at people with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), a common condition that causes abdominal cramping and diarrhea or constipation that can be debilitating for many. Half of the study volunteers were told they were getting an “open-label” placebo and the others got nothing at all. He found that there was a dramatic and significant improvement in the placebo group’s IBS symptoms, even though they were explicitly told they were getting a “sugar pill” without any active medication.
Kaptchuk says placebos won’t work for every medical situation—for example, they can’t lower cholesterol or cure cancer. But they can work for conditions that are defined by “self-observation” symptoms like pain, nausea, or fatigue.
“People can still get a placebo response, even though they know they are on a placebo,” he adds. “You don’t need deception or concealment for many conditions to get a significant and meaningful placebo effect.”
Are open-label placebos a promising new strategy?
Kaptchuk says more research is needed — and some is currently under way. He has another study at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute studying cancer-related fatigue. And a recent study overseas looking at open-label placebo for chronic low back pain looks promising. If placebo works for chronic pain, explains Kaptchuk, it could allow patients to reduce their doses of opioid medications and help prevent addiction.
“Our hope is that in conditions where the open-label placebo might be valuable, instead of putting people on drugs immediately — for depression, chronic pain, fatigue — that people would be put on placebo,” says Kaptchuk. “If it works, great. If not, then go on to drugs.”
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Bailey_Texas• in reply to
The power of the placebo effect
Treating yourself with your mind is possible, but there is more to it than positive thinking.
Published: May, 2017
Your mind can be a powerful healing tool when given the chance. The idea that your brain can convince your body a fake treatment is the real thing — the so-called placebo effect — and thus stimulate healing has been around for millennia. Now science has found that under the right circumstances, a placebo can be just as effective as traditional treatments.
"The placebo effect is more than positive thinking — believing a treatment or procedure will work. It's about creating a stronger connection between the brain and body and how they work together," says Professor Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard-affiliated Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, whose research focuses on the placebo effect.
Placebos won't lower your cholesterol or shrink a tumor. Instead, they work on symptoms modulated by the brain, like the perception of pain. "Placebos may make you feel better, but they will not cure you," says Kaptchuk. "They have been shown to be most effective for conditions like pain management, stress-related insomnia, and cancer treatment side effects like fatigue and nausea."
Failure or success?
For years, a placebo effect was considered a sign of failure. A placebo is used in clinical trials to test the effectiveness of treatments and is most often used in drug studies. For instance, people in one group get the tested drug, while the others receive a fake drug, or placebo, that they think is the real thing. This way, the researchers can measure if the drug works by comparing how both groups react. If they both have the same reaction — improvement or not — the drug is deemed not to work.
More recently, however, experts have concluded that reacting to a placebo is not proof that a certain treatment doesn't work, but rather that another, non-pharmacological mechanism may be present.
How placebos work is still not quite understood, but it involves a complex neurobiological reaction that includes everything from increases in feel-good neurotransmitters, like endorphins and dopamine, to greater activity in certain brain regions linked to moods, emotional reactions, and self-awareness. All of it can have therapeutic benefit. "The placebo effect is a way for your brain to tell the body what it needs to feel better," says Kaptchuk.
But placebos are not all about releasing brainpower. You also need the ritual of treatment. "When you look at these studies that compare drugs with placebos, there is the entire environmental and ritual factor at work," says Kaptchuk. "You have to go to a clinic at certain times and be examined by medical professionals in white coats. You receive all kinds of exotic pills and undergo strange procedures. All this can have a profound impact on how the body perceives symptoms because you feel you are getting attention and care."
Give yourself a placebo
Placebos often work because people don't know they are getting one. But what happens if you know you are getting a placebo?
A 2014 study led by Kaptchuk and published in Science Translational Medicine explored this by testing how people reacted to migraine pain medication. One group took a migraine drug labeled with the drug's name, another took a placebo labeled "placebo," and a third group took nothing. The researchers discovered that the placebo was 50% as effective as the real drug to reduce pain after a migraine attack.
The researchers speculated that a driving force beyond this reaction was the simple act of taking a pill. "People associate the ritual of taking medicine as a positive healing effect," says Kaptchuk. "Even if they know it's not medicine, the action itself can stimulate the brain into thinking the body is being healed."
How can you give yourself a placebo besides taking a fake pill? Practicing self-help methods is one way. "Engaging in the ritual of healthy living — eating right, exercising, yoga, quality social time, meditating — probably provides some of the key ingredients of a placebo effect," says Kaptchuk.
While these activities are positive interventions in their own right, the level of attention you give can enhance their benefits. "The attention and emotional support you give yourself is often not something you can easily measure, but it can help you feel more comfortable in the world, and that can go a long way when it comes to healing."
The placebo sweet spot
Image: © PhonlamaiPhoto/Thinkstock
A study published online Oct. 27, 2016, by PLOS Biology may have identified what goes on in the brain during a placebo effect. Researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brains of people with chronic pain from knee osteoarthritis. Then everyone was given a placebo and had another brain scan. The researchers noticed that those who felt pain relief had greater activity in the middle frontal gyrus brain region, which makes up about one-third of the frontal lobe.
• in reply toBailey_Texas
Thanks
I was pretty sure NAC was going to work for me. Yet it did nothing for my Parkinson's. I was less sure about thiamine, yet that is helping. Placebo effect fails to explain this sequence of results.
What i was trying to say is if enough people swear that Thiamine works for them and the doctor says it works for every one some people would want to work for them even if it did not they would think it did.
I
The Placebo effect can be powerful and can last for months
As far as I know, the placebo effect does not affect the non-motor symptoms, the tremor and the balance, which in my case are improved considerably and almost absent after three years of b1.
Do you remember how long it took for tremors to start to subside...
Hi Toogood,
in my case the tremor has never been a great concern for me, but it has improved very gradually since the first days and then disappeared completely after about eight months,
On the last visit from Costantini we saw the videos of the resting hands that tremble (hands in the lap) of 1,2,3 years ago and I assure you that I was impressed by the changes I had of the intense tremor from the first video to now I can say that when stiffness is improved, most movement take away to anxiety, stress and trembling.
Gio
I would recommend you books by Joe Dispaneza if you didn't read.Google it about books all the best.
Placebos can reach an impressive 100% effectiveness indeed.
check the following human study which was funded by MJ Fox Foundation
Phase IIb Study of Intranasal Glutathione in Parkinson's Disease.
ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/284...
This was a double-blind, placebo-controlled trial of 45 individuals with Hoehn & Yahr Stage 1-3 PD
Duration: 3 months
RESULTS:
All cohorts improved over the intervention period, including placebo. The high-dose group demonstrated improvement in total Unified PD Rating Scale (UPDRS) (-4.6 (4.7), P = 0.0025) and UPDRS motor subscore (-2.2 (3.8), P = 0.0485) over baseline, although neither treatment group was superior to placebo.
CONCLUSIONS:
....These data do not suggest (in)GSH is superior to placebo after a three-month intervention. The improvement in the placebo arm was more robust than has been observed in previous PD studies and warrants further investigation.
Maybe some rat studies which not subject to the placebo effect are more trustworthy after all...
I recommend Dr Joe Dispaneza books.
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