Placebo effect for babies and animals

[Mojo]

Ah, so you are suggesting that the placebo effect is a bias in reporting beneficial effects rather than actual effects? A hypothesis worth pursuing...

There is certainly the issue of the parent/owner seeing what they want to see, or what they expect to see.

...but aren't there reports of placebos causing actual, measurable effects such as reduced blood pressure, not just the patient reporting feeling better?

I'm not aware of any in animals or pre-language children. See, though, the "discrepancies between single-blind and double-blind methods" in the rat study that skbunks linked to above. When the people administering the treatment and looking after the rats knew which rats had received a homoeopathic remedy and which had received placebo, significant differences in outcome between the groups were observed. When they were blinded, the differences vanished for the homoeopathic remedies (although not for the "allopathic" anti-inflammatories used in the trial). The researchers taking the measurements were blinded in both cases.

[Mongrel]

That's what I meant.

Apologies in that case.

If the belief that one is receiving treatment can cause the brain to activate the body's own recovery processes (whatever they may be) then it opens up some interesting possibilities.

Placebo does nothing for the recovery process, it only affects the recipients (or their representatives) perception. Placebos won't heal a broken bone any quicker than normal but may 'reduce' the pain felt

For instance, if one believes that the placebo effect works, presumably it would be possible to self-administer placebo pills and they would work just as well as placebos "dishonestly" prescribed by a doctor.

Knowing that you're self dosing with placebos defeats the object of them, one of the factors of an effective placebo is that the recipient thinks they're getting the real thing. Would you chew a handful of Smarties for pain relief?

In fact, why bother with the pills at all ...

I agree, people (and the media don't help) seem to want a pill to cure everthing. When Obecalp was launched it caused a stir for exactly that reason. Reaching for a bottle of tablets for every symptom is a bad thing.

maybe all that is needed is a belief that the body will heal itself of anything not serious enough to do permanent damage.

You don't even need to believe it for it to be true, the body is remarkably good at what it does.

Could this be how I managed nearly 30 years without ever needing a doctor, until something mechanical went wrong that needed surgery?

Or you could just be lucky enough to have never suffered from anything that needed a Doctors attention and sensible enough to not rush to the surgery for every cough, cold and sniffle.

Or a phobia about Doctors

[Trinoc]

Or you could just be lucky enough to have never suffered from anything that needed a Doctors attention and sensible enough to not rush to the surgery for every cough, cold and sniffle.

Or a phobia about Doctors

All of the above!