Review article
https://doi.org/10.24141/1/6/2/10
The Biological Basis of The Placebo Effect
Nikolina Šaravanja
orcid.org/0000-0002-5317-3875
; Study of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina
Dragutin Ivanec
orcid.org/0000-0002-3051-3208
; Department of Psychology, Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences, University of Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
Theoretically neutral treatment that leads to positive outcomes is called the placebo effect. Such an effect has been observed and documented in both laboratory and clinical studies in a variety of health symptoms and pathological conditions. In the traditional notion of the placebo effect, those were considered effects that should be primarily methodologically controlled in order to assess the effect of theoretically grounded therapeutic approaches as precisely as possible. In more modern approaches, it is a real effect that has its observable psychological and physiological mechanisms and processes. It can be independent or a part of all other therapeutic procedures. Based on this, in a health context, the goal should not be only to control such an effect but to understand it as well as possible so it could possibly be used with known and theoretically based health treatments. In this article the emphasis is on describing biological mechanisms and processes that contribute to the placebo effect. The area of an analgesic placebo effect is dominantly described, but cases of the placebo effect have also been described in cases of some other pathological conditions where the biological mechanisms of a placebo effect have been investigated, such as mental illnesses and disorders, or Parkinson’s disease. For all placebo effects, there have been many indicators that there is a complex relation between psychological factors which, in the interaction with physiological processes, contribute a real improvement in health outcomes.
Keywords
placebo effect; biological basis; endogenous opioids
Hrčak ID:
244595
URI
Publication date:
7.10.2020.
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