and I was talking to my roommate about the silly practice a lot of college kids have of downing a ton of orange juice hoping the vitamin C will improve their immune response. Apparently, it ain't quite as silly as I thought. The placebo effect can still make you feel a little better even if you already know it's just a placebo. That is, if you know about the placebo effect.
Say someone gives you water, but tells you it's alcohol and you drink it. And you keep drinking it. And drinking. You get "drunk" because you believe it's actual alcohol.
Fun facts, kids: the Placebo effect, mixed with positive thinking scenarios and exercises has helped stop the spread of cancer in some patients, and has also helped the recovery of people with various mental illnesses. Staaaay Positive! ^ Paraphrasing an old psychology teacher (She was never this cheery though). You'll hear the term used mainly in taking medication. Let's say you've got a stomach ache, and you visit the doctors. The doctor gives you a pills, and says, this will cure you of your stomach problems. You take the pills believing they are curing you, and you recover. Those pills, however, were hollowed out and there wasn't any medicine inside them. So if you weren't given any medicine, how were you healed? The Placebo effect is basically the power of positive thinking, of believing something and it coming true. In this case, believing that drinking orange juice will cure you of sickness has made some people feel better, when in reality the orange juice chemically isn't actually doing much of anything.
The reverse is also true, keep thinking you' ve been cursed and you might actually get ill. The placebo effect was "invented" by the doctor who discovered the nocebo effect in order to counter it. It' s got vitamin C, which sort of acts like cafein and might very well boost immunity (though it remains hypothetical for now). However, contrary to popular belief, orange juice kinda sucks as a source for vitamin C. Blackcurrant holds much more of it for instance.
I so wish it was ethical to prescribe sugar pills to patients that could be helped with some positive thinking >.<
Hm. I understand the hypothesis, but water and alcohol taste different, so wouldn't they be able to tell it's not alcohol?
Taking out a leaf from your book, ha, your comment made me think of that. Bit wordy, but I like it. And I meant more of an immediate effect, the placebo would probably kick in quicker than the body absorbing the vitamins, making the actual substance almost irrelevant.
It's just an example of the concept. Better and more believable example is taking a pill that you believe will have a certain effect on your body, say remedy for a headache, when in actuality it's just a sugar pill.
