WHAT’S HOT TO WATCH TODAY
BROKEN up with a partner? Struggling to shake off your negative feelings towards them? Need cheering up?
I have the perfect solution. It’s something you just need to stick up your nose.
By which, before you ask, I mean a nasal spray. Seriously. In a medical trial, featured tonight on a BBC2 documentary, handing out this spray to people who’ve recently suffered a relationship split is shown to significantly lift their spirits.
And then they’re then told it’s nothing but salt water.
In THE PLACEBO EXPERIMENT: CAN MY BRAIN CURE MY BODY? (9pm) Michael Mosley – yes, him again – asks if our minds alone can help us feel better, particularly if we’re tricked into believing we’re getting proper medication.
And not just emotionally better but physically better too, maybe?
For the main chunk of the show, 100-plus volunteers in Blackpool are given pills for their chronic back pain and told some of these may be fake. The truth is they’ve ALL been given fake pills. Do they feel better in any case? Surely not.
We even hear from a surgeon who’s carried out placebo surgery on people with shoulder pain, then compared the results to those where he’d done the op for real. His conclusions? You may be a wee bit gobsmacked. ELSEWHERE, in EAT WELL FOR LESS? (BBC1, 8pm) Gregg Wallace and Chris Bavin head to the Hertfordshire home of parents Emma and Poppy, too knackered by their young twins to have proper meals themselves.
“They’re eating crisps for dinner!” Gregg gasps.
Ah, yes, Gregg, but maybe they’re placebo crisps.