Ask Dr Miriam

Q You keep going on about the placebo effect, but I really don’t understand what you mean. What is a placebo and what does it do?

A A placebo is a dummy drug or a dummy treatment that contains nothing which could make you better.

However, about one in three of us will get better taking a dummy treatment if we “believe” it will make us better.

The most dramatic example I know is a study I wrote about on this page.

Researchers wanted to see whether or not knee surgery truly helped sufferers with an injury. They split the patients into two groups – one had proper surgery but the other had dummy surgery where the knee was cut, nothing was done, and then it was stitched up. Now here comes the surprise. The placebo effect was so powerful that the group who had received an incision but didn’t have any treatment recovered just as well as the patients who had the full treatment. Yes, astonishing. But that’s the placebo effect.