Mary Poppins says a spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
Science says the medicine sometimes is a spoonful of sugar, or a sugar pill, to be exact. From a Washington Post story about research into antidepressants: “The placebo effect – the phenomenon of patients feeling better after they’ve been treated with dud pills – is seen throughout the field of medicine. But new research suggests that the placebo may play an extraordinary role in the treatment of depression, where how people feel spells the difference between sickness and health.”
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Many drug trials employ the use of placebos in a control group so results can be compared with those of people actually taking a new drug. Some people get sugar pills, some people get the test treatment, and scientists analyze the effects.
The Post story tells of a trial held this spring in which a herbal remedy for depression cured 24 percent of depressed people who received it and a manufactured drug cured 25 percent. The placebo cured 32 percent.
Scientists say this doesn’t mean anti-depressants are ineffective. Rather, it may mean people tend to over-estimate the power of drugs or that people or their doctors underestimate the effects of psychology upon patients’ physical health.
British physiologist Patrick Wall is a leading expert on the placebo effect. As quoted in The Science of Consciousness, Wall has found that as placebos, capsules containing coloured beads are more effective than coloured tablets, which are superior to white tablets with corners, which are better than round white tablets. Tablets taken from a bottle labelled with a well-known brand name are superior to the same tablets taken from a bottle with a typed label.
Wall says his favourite example of placebo administration is a doctor who always handles the sugar tablets with forceps, assuring the patient that they are too powerful to be touched by hand.
Sugar pills as treatment for depression could certainly keep costs down when considering the ills of this country – as one may be inclined to do at the start of a new year. Used wisely, they might even reduce the cost of implementing the Romanow report on health care.
Yet another thought intrudes. The government has presumably been trying to cure the various ills of this country through treatments such as Kyoto Protocol ratification, the new gun registry and the national agricultural policy framework.
That must mean that, no matter how bitter the pill, western Canadian farmers are always in the control group.
