Page 158 - Encyclopedia of the Unusual and Unexplained Vol. 3

Mysteries of the Mind 139

placebo is a tablet or a liquid with no
medical qualities that physicians will
give to calm the anxieties of patients who
A insist upon receiving drugs when none
are deemed necessary. In other instances, pharma-
Mind Over Matter
cologists who wish to test the effects of a new drug
may give placebos to a control group and the real with Placebos
drug to another as a method of gaining a more accu-
rate determination of the effectiveness of the drug
Sources:
under development.
Czerner, Thomas B. What Makes You Tick? The Brain in Plain
On April 30, 2002, researchers at the University of English. New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2001.
Texas Health Science Center announced their find- Fox, Maggie. “Placebo, Drugs Both Activate Brain in Pain
ings that depressed people given a placebo exhibited Relief.” Yahoo! News/Reuters, February 7, 2002. [Online]
changes in their brain that were nearly identical to http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u/nm/20020
those produced by a popular antidepressant. The 207/sc_nm/science_pain_dc_1.
Moore, Oliver. “Placebo Can Fool the Brain, Study Finds.” Globe
leader of the research group, Dr. Helen Mayberg, Uni-
and Mail, April 30, 2002. [Online] http://www.globeandmail.
versity of Toronto Professor of Neurology and Psychi-
com/servlet/RTGAMArticleHTMLTemplate?tf=tgam/realtime/
atry, said that patients who responded to the placebo
ful.
and those who responded to the actual antidepres-
Shapiro, Arthur K., and Elaine Shapiro. The Powerful Placebo:
sant showed similar metabolic changes in cortical
From Ancient Priest to Modern Physician. Baltimore, Md.:
(thinking) and limbic-paralimbic (emotional) regions of
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.
their brains. Of the 15 men who completed the study at
the health center, eight had experienced a noticeable
improvement in their symptoms. Four had been admin-
istered the drug, and four had been given a placebo.
Volunteers in a pain relief experiment conducted
by the Neurophysiology Research Group in Stock-
holm, Sweden, also demonstrated that both placebos
and powerful painkilling drugs activate the same
areas of the brain. Brain scans indicated that both the
true painkilling drug and a salt water placebo activat-
ed the same two areas of the brain—the rostral ante-
rior cingular cortex and the brain stem.

Ingvar said that perhaps the most unexpected
finding of the experiment was that those individuals
who responded most strongly to the true drug also
responded most positively to the placebo injection.
Such a discovery may indicate that certain people
have “stronger pathways in the brain for pain relief.”
According to the researchers, pain relief may often lit-
erally be a case of mind over matter.

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