If pain is “real,” why do placebos work sometimes? Good question! As a chiropractor, I treat a lot of people who are in a lot of pain. I have worked with people who were experiencing excruciating back pain and I’ve treated people who “should have” felt a lot of pain considering the condition of their spine, who weren’t. Pain tolerance differs greatly between people, and that is why I always ask my patients to pinpoint the level of pain they are feeling on a scale from 1 to 10. Could it be that pain may be “all in our heads.? A recent study appearing in the journal Science has revealed that the “placebo effect” goes right down to the spine, i.e., the spine is capable of regulating pain by dampening pain signals.
Through the use of fMRI, German researchers studied changes in spinal cord activity when individuals believed that they had been given an anesthetic rather than a placebo. They found that simply believing a pain treatment was effective actually dampened pain signaling in a region of their spinal cord, called the dorsal horn, suggesting a powerful biological mechanism was at work.
Traditionally, experts have viewed the effect of placebos as psychological, but the new research is the latest study to show evidence that there is an important physical component. The researchers found that the placebo effect is particularly strong when treating central nervous system conditions, like depression and pain.
For more on the researchers and their fascinating study, go to: reuters.com