What an amazing process! Take a sugar pill, drink some water or stick yourself with a needle and miraculous things can happen to your body. Not just parlor tricks, either. Tumors get healed. Diseases go away. Pain diminishes. Things happen that defy conventional description.
Which is what brings me to my question. What is the placebo effect. Yes yes yes… I know the dictionary definition, but what I would like to know is what is the biologist’s explanation? Have we (that is, the collective we) even begun to come up with an explanation of how our mind can have such a dramatic effect on our bodies? Thanks.
Rhythmdvl
Once in a while you can get shown the light
in the strangest of places
if you look at it right…
Your mental health is very important to your physical health. Your body can provide more antibodies, adjust serotonin levels to alleviate pain, etc., all on its own. If you want to get better, and if you believe you will get better, then your body does a better job of it.
Physiologically, there’s no easy answer why. Your thought processes and your autonomic control center are housed in the same organ (the brain), so it makes sense that one can affect the other, but the neurological interactions are too complex to understand, and too boring to mention even if we could. (This brain stem produces that chemical, which travels along this pathway, blah blah blah.)
Evolutionarily speaking, mental effects on health (such as the placebo effect and depression) make sense. Take a tribe of 50 hominids. There’s only enough food for 50, so nature wants the fittest to survive. If you’re the type to think positively, to push on in the face of adversity, then that’s beneficial to the tribe, and nature provides you an immuno-boost because of it. If you think negatively, start unnecessary fights, and give up easily, then the tribe suffers, so nature punishes your immune system. (Pessimistic and chronically angry or depressed people have a much shorter life expectancy, even among those who die of natural causes.)