At this time of year, it feels like people are constantly warning you they are “coming down” with a cold. But if I have a slightly sore throat or a runny nose, I always try to say that I am “fighting off” the virus instead.
Because the nervous system runs from the brain into every organ of the body, what we believe can have a powerful effect on how we respond to illness. Neuroscientists are still trying to work out the specific mechanism behind this link, but the placebo effect is still regularly proven to be one of the strongest medical responses there is.
Here’s one extraordinary example: researchers got ethical permission to experiment on people who needed different kinds of knee surgery. They put them all under a general anaesthetic and made an incision in their knee.
Then half of them underwent surgery and the other half didn’t – their knee was stitched up exactly as it had been, instead. The placebo effect was so powerful that for some kinds of knee injury, the group who had an incision but did not have the surgery recovered just as well as those who’d had the whole package.
Dr Daniel Glaser is director of Science Gallery at King’s College London
