PLACEBO:THE POWER OF YOUR MIND
The placebo effect is something I am absolutely fascinated with. It hints to our innate abilities and how powerful we truly are when it comes to the things we actively believe.
A placebo is an inactive substance [belief] which produces genuine physiological/biological effects in humans. Basically, its thinking a pill/action does something, therefore it actually does do something. It’s so universally accepted as fact that a placebo variable is included in most medical tests as a way of proving if drugs work on their own merits or because people “think” they work.
There are tons of tests confirming the proof of the placebo, but one of the most entertaining to watch is a test done by a group of Princeton students who decided to throw a non-alcoholic keg party for their innocent classmates.
The experimenters filled a keg with O’Douls (which contains only around 0.4% alcohol while regular beer has around 5% alcohol) then they watched as their peers "acted" drunk, slurred words, even slept on the ground, and acted a fool in general. It’s unlikely anyone could get intoxicated off of O’Douls, but these college students had such a strong belief they were drinking regular beer that it affected their behavior. Mind over matter in action.
Researchers are finding the placebo effect to be getting stronger. Drugs that have been on the market for years, such as Prozac, are proving less effective than the placebos. This is a major concern for big pharmaceutical companies, which has left many scrambling to conduct neurological studies to come up with new ways to protect their industry from your average sugar pills. Big Pharma is more profitable than Big Oil, so you can imagine what's at stake here for them. For you what is at stake is your ACTUAL health. Not the one they sell to you, the one you have innately.
