Horizon 2014 The Power of the Placebo PDTV x264 [MVGroup org]

I've read about this Professor Kaptchuk doing research on patients with IBS already about three years ago. But this research should not be done on people with IBS. The cause of IBS itself is not even explained and there might even be many different causes.

Serotonin plays a significant role in the workings of the guts (there are about as many neurons in the guts as there are in the brain) and in the brain concerning mood. There has been established a correlation between IBS and depression. SRI's (a particular kind of antidepressants) have been shown to have a placebo-effect of about 75%, which is about as large as its overall effectiveness (this begs the question if SRI's have any effect besides the placebo-effect at all). So to do such experiments on people with IBS leads to an entanglement of complexities of unknown factors which can't yet be disentangled and will very likely lead to false conclusions.

This doctor may be at the pinnacle of the world intellect at Harvard, but he's making a mistake and he should choose patients with explained illnesses if he want to do research on placebos.

All what's known is that placebos can relieve symptoms, but they certainly do not cure. This is not new knowledge and that's why for decades already medical tests have to be done using placebos in test-groups to be able to determine what a new medicine is doing without the placebo-effect. This because the real medicine also has a placebo-effect (this is something many placebo-as-cure advocates don't seem to realize), so there can be corrected for the placebo-effect in the test-results of this medicine to show its actual effectiveness.

The brain is still amazing though, in the fact that a placebo can have any effect at all, even though it's only symptom-relief, but also in the fact that it can make us feel symptoms of illnesses that may not be as severe as we think and feel they are or might be. A placebo might just be correcting for an overreaction of the brain when we think or know there's something wrong with us and makes us feel more ill or perceive more pain then we actually ought to perceive in relation to the actual illness.