Anxiety Responds To Placebos

Placebos can beat back anxiety almost as well as conventional anti-anxiety medications. An article in the journal Neuron reveals that placebos have been shown to be almost as effective as benzodiazepines in lowering anxiety.

In an experiment, Swedish researchers showed volunteers images of mutilated bodies, and asked the volunteers to rate the degree of unpleasantness they felt. Then they gave the volunteers a benzodiazepine and told them that the pill would reduce the degree of unpleasantness. It did.

The next day they repeated the experiment, only they gave the volunteers a placebo and then told them that it would decrease the degree of unpleasantness. It did-- almost as much as the real drug.

On both days the researchers performed fMRI brain scans on the volunteers. The scans showed that both pills - the real medications and the placebos- acted to reduce activity in areas of the limbic brain associated with anxiety.

Similar results have previously been achieved in treating depression with placebos.

Apparently, the expectation of actually getting better may be as important in a therapeutic response to real medication as it is in placebos. A positive expectation may also be valuable in the application of many alternative and complimentary therapies.

Though doctors have a duty top help their patients, the use of placebos as a real treatment is considered unethical.

Skeptics have long criticized the efficacy of therapies such as acupuncture and hypnotherapy as being no more than a result of "the placebo effect." 

The question that remains is: how much of the success of conventional medications is due to "the placebo effect?"

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