According to a recent study, someday doctors may prescribe sugar pills for certain chronic pain patients based on their brain anatomy and psychology. And the pills can reduce the pain as effectively as any powerful drug on the market.<\/p>\n
A. Vania Apkarian, author of the study said, \u201cTheir (Patients) brain is already tuned to respond. They have the appropriate psychology and biology that puts them in a cognitive state that as soon as you say, \u2018this may make your pain better,\u2019 their pain gets better.\u201d There\u2019s no need to fool the patient, Apkarian said.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou can tell them, \u2018I\u2019m giving you a drug that has no physiological effect but your brain will respond to it. You don\u2019t need to hide it. There is a biology behind the placebo response,\u201d Apkarian adds.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s much better to give someone a non-active drug rather than an active drug and get the same result,\u201d Apkarian said. \u201cMost pharmacological treatments have long-term adverse effects or addictive properties. Placebo becomes as good an option for treatment as any drug we have on the market.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cDrug trials would need to recruit fewer people, and identifying the physiological effects would be much easier,\u201d Apkarian said. \u201cYou\u2019ve taken away a big component of noise in the study.\u201d<\/p>\n
A sugar pill prescription for chronic pain patients would result in vast cost savings for patients and the healthcare system, Apkarian said.<\/p>\n
As part of the research, about 60 chronic back pain patients were randomized into two arms of the study. In one arm, subjects didn\u2019t know if they got the drug or the placebo. Researchers didn\u2019t study the people who got the real drug. The other study arm included people who came to the clinic but didn\u2019t get a placebo or drug. They were in the control group.<\/p>\n
The individuals whose pain decreased as a result of the sugar pill had a similar brain anatomy and psychological traits. The right side of their emotional brain was larger than the left, and they had a larger cortical sensory area than people who were not responsive to the placebo. The chronic pain placebo responders also were emotionally self-aware, sensitive to painful situations and mindful of their environment.<\/p>\n
\u201cClinicians who are treating chronic pain patients should seriously consider that some will get as good a response to a sugar pill as any other drug,\u201d Apkarian said. \u201cThey should use it and see the outcome. This opens up a whole new field.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
According to a recent study, someday doctors may prescribe sugar pills for certain chronic pain patients based on their brain anatomy and psychology. And the pills can reduce the pain as effectively as any powerful drug on the market. A. Vania Apkarian, author of the study said, \u201cTheir (Patients) brain is already tuned to respond. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":42209,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[239],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42208","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-health"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42208","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42208"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42208\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42210,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42208\/revisions\/42210"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/42209"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42208"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42208"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blastingskyhawk.com\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42208"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}