Five ways ‘honest’ placebos can help
Placebos can be powerful tools for treating anxiety, depression, and chronic pain. But the assumption that the patient must be deceived into believing that they are getting an active treatment, rather than an inert drug, means that some medical practitioners feel it is unethical to use them.
These practitioners may be pleased to hear that there's growing evidence that 'honest', 'open-label', and 'non-deceptive' placebos can work, too. In these studies, patients are usually told that they are not being given an active drug, but that there's evidence it might help anyway. According to some recent findings, this honest approach can (in certain cases) be as effective as deception.
'Just think: what if someone took a side-effect-free sugar pill twice a day after going through a short, convincing video on the power of placebos, and experienced reduced stress as a result?'
This was the question posed by Darwin Gueverra at Michigan State University in the wake of his team's 2020 research on almost 300 people, which investigated the effects of an honest placebo on distress. In this study, those who were first given a saline nasal spray – which they were told contained no active ingredients but which would help to reduce negative feelings if they believed it would – not only reported feeling less emotional distress when shown disturbing images but also showed weaker brain signals of distress.
