Can my brain cure my back pain?

This is another study done on the effects of a placebo. It doesn’t address why people experience debilitating back pain in the first place but still interesting.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-45721670 (Can my brain cure my back pain?)

 

What interests me the most about that article is that people even get better when they know that they are taking a placebo pill. I was reading two books by Kristin Prevallet called 'Visualize Comfort' and 'Resourceful You', which both (in part) discuss the placebo affect. 'Visualize Comfort' talks about a hardware designer in Silicon Valley in the USA called Nancy Dougherty who found that she felt better taking placebo pills. Someone filmed (unfortunately rather amateurishly) a talk she gave about it, which is on YouTube that I found interesting: .

Nancy labelled some placebo pills (which she called 'mindfulness pills') individually as being for 'focus/willpower', 'energy', 'calm' and 'happy', and embedded sensors in those placebo pills...Even though she knew that they were placebo pills the data collected and analysed from the sensors that went to an app on her phone showed that when she took, for instance, an 'energy' pill her heart rate went up and when she took a 'focus' pill she was more productive. I guess the pills primed her brain.

 

Good to see some of this stuff getting mainstream coverage at last - big piece in yesterday's Times too (can't link to it because of their paywall). The programme is on the BBC tonight for those in the UK.