Om placeboeffekten og at «mening» er bedre å bruke enn en placeborespons når vi snakker om behandling. Placebo-sukkerpillen har ingen effekt i kroppen, men meningen vi legger i den har det. Vi får en «meningsrespons». Selv medisiner eller operasjoner får bedre effekt når det er en «mening» bak det.

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=715182

http://www.homeopathy.org/wp-content/uploads/downloads/2012/05/Mossman.pdf

We provide a new perspective with which to understand what for a half century has been known as the “placebo effect.” We argue that, as currently used, the concept includes much that has noth- ing to do with placebos, confusing the most interesting and im- portant aspects of the phenomenon. We propose a new way to understand those aspects of medical care, plus a broad range of additional human experiences, by focusing on the idea of “mean- ing,” to which people, when they are sick, often respond.

We review several of the many areas in medicine in which meaning affects illness or healing and introduce the idea of the “meaning response.” We suggest that use of this formulation, rather than the fixation on inert placebos, will probably lead to far greater insight into how treatment works and perhaps to real improvements in human well-being.

If we replace the word “placebo” in the second sentence with its definition from the first, we get: “The placebo effect is the therapeutic effect produced by [things] objectively without specific activity for the condition being treated.” This makes no sense whatsoever. Indeed, it flies in the face of the obvious. The one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that placebos do not cause placebo effects. Placebos are inert and don’t cause anything.

Moreover, people frequently expand the concept of the placebo effect very broadly to include just about every conceivable sort of beneficial biological, social, or human interaction that doesn’t involve some drug well- known to the pharmacopoeia.

The concept of the placebo effect has been expanded much more broadly than this. Some attribute the effects of various alternative medical systems, such as homeopathy (33) or chiropractic (34), to the placebo effect. Others have described studies that show the positive effects of enhanced communication, such as Egbert’s (35), as “the placebo re- sponse without the placebo” (7). No wonder things are confusing.

Instead, they can be ex- plained by the “meanings” in the experiment: 1) Red means “up,” “hot,” “danger,” while blue means “down,” “cool,” “quiet” and 2) two means more than one. These effects of color (37– 40) and number (41, 42) have been widely replicated.

In this study, branded aspirin worked better than unbranded aspirin, which worked better than branded placebo, which worked better than unbranded placebo.

Aspirin relieves headaches, but so does the knowledge that the pills you are taking are “good” ones.

n a study of the benefits of aerobic exercise, two groups participated in a 10-week exercise program. One group was told that the exercise would enhance their aerobic capacity, while the other group was told that the exercise would enhance aerobic capacity and psychological well-being. Both groups improved their aerobic capacity, but only the second group improved in psychological well-being (actually “self-esteem”). The re- searchers called this “strong evidence . . . that exercise may enhance psychological well-being via a strong placebo effect” (44).

It seems reasonable to label all these effects (except, of course, of the aspirin and the exercise) as “mean- ing responses,” a term that seeks, among other things, to recall Dr. Herbert Benson’s “relaxation response” (45). Ironically, although placebos clearly cannot do anything themselves, their meaning can.

We define the meaning response as the physiologic or psychological effects of meaning in the origins or treatment of illness; meaning responses elicited after the use of inert or sham treatment can be called the “placebo effect” when they are desirable and the “nocebo effect” (46) when they are undesirable.

Insofar as medicine is meaningful, it can affect pa- tients, and it can affect the outcome of treatment (47– 49). Most elements of medicine are meaningful, even if practitioners do not intend them to be so. The physi- cian’s costume (the white coat with stethoscope hanging out of the pocket) (50), manner (enthusiastic or not), style (therapeutic or experimental), and language (51) are all meaningful and can be shown to affect the out- come; indeed, we argue that both diagnosis (52) and prognosis (53) can be important forms of treatment.

Likewise, acupuncture analgesia can be reversed with naloxone in animals (61) and people (62). To say that a treatment such as acupuncture “isn’t better than placebo” does not mean that it does nothing.

Surgery is particularly meaningful: Surgeons are among the elite of medical practitioners; the shedding of blood is inevitably meaningful in and of itself.

The intensity of the effect was shown to be correlated with “the strength of commitment to traditional Chinese culture.” These differences in longevity (up to 6% or 7% difference in length of life!) are not due to having Chinese genes but to having Chinese ideas, to knowing the world in Chinese ways. The effects of meaning on health and disease are not restricted to placebos or brand names but permeate life.

Practitioners can benefit clinically by conceptualizing this issue in terms of the meaning response rather than the placebo effect. Placebos are inert. You can’t do anything about them. For human beings, meaning is everything that placebos are not, richly alive and powerful.

One reason we are so ignorant is that, by focusing on placebos, we constantly have to address the moral and ethical issues of prescribing inert treatments (73, 74), of lying (75), and the like. It seems possible to evade the entire issue by simply avoiding placebos. One cannot, however, avoid meaning while engaging human beings. Even the most distant objects—the planet Venus, the stars in the constellation Orion—are meaningful to us, as well as to others (76).