from the does-medicine-include-coffee dept.
Schedlowski is steadfastly optimistic that the benefits of conditioning are too great to ignore. "Ten years ago, nobody believed us," he says. "Now, journals are much more open-minded to this kind of approach." He believes that within a decade or two we'll see a revolution in which learning regimes will become a routine component of drug treatment for a wide range of conditions. Drug companies might not see the advantages now, but in future, he argues, they could use the reduced side-effects of lower doses as a selling point.
For now, though, there's a long way to go before the potential for conditioned immune responses is widely accepted, let alone used in the clinic. It's hard enough for people to entertain the idea of using placebos to treat pain, or psychiatric disorders, and using them to influence immune responses sounds even crazier.
Brain–immune interactions are a "blind spot" for immunologists, admits Ferguson, with funding and interest for this type of work practically non-existent. Researchers are "vaguely" aware that the two systems communicate, he says, "but there's this traditionality whereby people describe the immune system as everything going on from the neck downwards, and the central nervous system is everything from the neck upwards, and the two things haven't been linked very much."
Pavlov won a Nobel Prize for showing that the digestive system, previously thought to function independently, is in fact tightly controlled by the brain. Despite showing that the same is true for the immune system, Ader and Felten are barely known, even among immunologists. Schedlowski, supported by the DFG (the German Research Foundation), leads one of the only teams researching conditioned immune responses. "I like to say we're the best in the world," he jokes. "Because there is nobody else!"
The article's worth reading in full. It covers scientists who are trying to harness the placebo effect to reduce the dosages of drugs with toxic side effects for patients with serious diseases like lupus.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @10:04AM
Let's dumb down shit because the word "placebo" is too fucking eggheaditty.
Fuck xkcd.
Up Goer Five gonna train your body to think medicine, with one weird trick!
Fuck xkcd.
Mod me down for badmouthing XXX KKK CCC DDD the greatest shit ever made!!!!
Fuck xkcd.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @10:36AM
u mad, bro?
(Score: 3, Insightful) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday February 10 2016, @10:55AM
Schedlowski is steadfastly optimistic that the benefits of conditioning are too great to ignore.
Who the hell is Schedlowski? For that matter, what is "conditioning" in this context?
Just as you should define acronyms on first use, you should also define people (and concepts) on first use.
Taking the last four paragraphs of an article is very unlikely to create a decent summary.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @11:16AM
Yeah well if you don't like it you can fork your own news site. Freedom of the blog and all that. God bless Obama's ass.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday February 10 2016, @11:31AM
Yeah well if you don't like me complaining you can fork your own news site.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:53PM
Fork the lot of yous. Bastards.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @02:20PM
Who the hell is Schedlowski?
The other side of Lebowski's coin?
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @06:23PM
Which Lebowski?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2) by bart9h on Thursday February 11 2016, @01:57PM
The other one.
(Score: 1, Troll) by kurenai.tsubasa on Wednesday February 10 2016, @11:36AM
Uh... I know the placebo and nocebo effects, along with magical thinking that lets homeopathy et al "wotk" in the minds of its adhereants, are powers of the mind to be reckoned with.
So tell me. If my sodium crashes to the point I'm cramping up left and right and I'm running the risk of seizure, for example, how is this better than administering a saline drip? Also, how does this give me the Valentine Michael Smith-esque power to prevent my body from creating dihydrotestosterone and instead to metabolize the precourser into estrogen instead? Will I be able to use the powers of my mind to cause cosmetic changes to my body over time? Should I join the Church of All Worlds?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:18PM
Heres the Ader and Cohen 1975 paper they talk about:
http://liberationchiropractic.com/wp-content/uploads/research/1975Ader-Immunosuppression.pdf [liberationchiropractic.com]
If you compare the HA antibody levels of the placebo groups in the two experiments (ie fig 2/3) they change just as much as the apparent treatment effect of conditioning. So, unknown powerful factors are afoot. If the conditions required for a consistent experiment were understood this would not happen.
(Score: 5, Informative) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:21PM
So tell me. If my sodium crashes to the point I'm cramping up left and right and I'm running the risk of seizure, for example, how is this better than administering a saline drip?
It isn't. No-one's claiming it is.
Also, how does this give me the Valentine Michael Smith-esque power to prevent my body from creating dihydrotestosterone and instead to metabolize the precourser into estrogen instead?
It doesn't. No-one's claiming it does.
Will I be able to use the powers of my mind to cause cosmetic changes to my body over time?
You won't. No-one's claiming you would.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:29PM
Short answer to your questions is: no.
Placebos seem to be more effective in disease that has a psychological component, like chronic pain. If the effect becomes well understood, then it would probably be part of supportive care administered along with medicine that hits the root cause.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Wednesday February 10 2016, @03:16PM
However, this seems to be firmly targetting the physiological effects. As in, thinking you have taken medicine actually makes your immune system function better than it would otherwise.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @04:08PM
There was at least one study that showed the placebo effect at a similar level even when the patients were informed that they were getting sugar pills. Of course the study involving identical pills with and without branding showed differences so belief does have some influence.
(Score: 3, Touché) by opinionated_science on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:03PM
translation: Give us your money...
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:55PM
This criticism is getting kinda old.
No shit, non-profit research needs donations or tax money to get things done. Scientists trying to explain their research and justify it to the public is a good thing.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by VLM on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:09PM
I suppose it flows the other way too, so the old wives tale about getting stressed resulting in colds or other minor infection (sore throat or whatever) are probably slightly realistic rather than total garbage.
I bet the heliobacter people are all wound up, so being stressed could encourage immune failure that leads to bacterial infection that leads to stomach ulcers after all.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @01:16PM
It's pretty obvious that the nervous system can control the immune system. Some examples are: blushing out of embarrassment, adrenalin release after being scared, cortisol release due to stress, and Wim Hof.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @02:52PM
And ElectRx:
http://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2014-08-26 [darpa.mil]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 3, Informative) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @06:44PM
Not the slightest relation to the immune system.
I don't think adrenaline has a direct effect on the immune system (but then, I might be wrong on that one). However, adrenalin is definitely not part of the immune system. It's a hormone.
Again a hormone, although you finally at least picked one that has a quite direct effect on the immune system (in the form of suppressing it).
I don't see any relation to the immune system at all. Note that the immune system fights pathogens, not coldness.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @07:39PM
Regulation of vasodilation is important during inflammation and adrenaline is often used to suppress anaphylaxis.
Reference 16 from the Wim Hof article is a PNAS paper (Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflammation#Vasodilation_and_increased_permeability [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anaphylaxis#Epinephrine [wikipedia.org]
http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379.abstract [pnas.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @11:10PM
Hof has five children: four from a prior marriage, and a son (born in 2003) with his current wife. -- This man is a fscking hero! Able to resist cold? What the fsck! This man will be fscking and having children until he dies! Someone *must* discover his secret and make erectile disfunction drugs obsolete! He must have some amazing DNA and be a fscking mutant!
Let's send him to mars with 40 women. I'm sure it will be populated with 5000 people in twenty years and able to survive in the native athmosphere without technology help.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday February 10 2016, @05:19PM
Another possibility is that the placebo effect is not real when it comes to contributions toward curing actual illness, and is just a side effect of us having broken incentives when selecting patients for trials.
Do you claim to feel pain or depression? The higher the amount you claim to feel, the more likely you are to be accepted into a trial (and get some money or free health care). After "treatment", when there's no incentive to say you feel it anymore, how bad do you feel then? It can make it look like the treatments work in clinical trials, even with placebos; the worse your selection incentives are broken, the bigger the placebo effect will appear.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Wednesday February 10 2016, @06:32PM
FTFA:
I wonder what motivation those rats might have had to voluntarily die from infections. I'm sure it was not free medication. ;-)
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Bobs on Wednesday February 10 2016, @07:23PM
The Placebo effect is real.
Scientists do not have a good understanding of it yet. I think it is interesting and useful once we get a better understanding of how best to exploit it.
Harvard Medical school has an initiative underway to get a better understanding of the process:
More info:
"Putting the placebo effect to work - Rather than dismiss it, we should try to understand the placebo effect and harness it when we can. “
- http://www.health.harvard.edu/mind-and-mood/putting-the-placebo-effect-to-work [harvard.edu]
http://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2010/12/placebos-work-%E2%80%94-even-without-deception/ [harvard.edu]
I can go on at length as there is a lot more good research / data / information out there on the subject: Happy to discuss if anyone is interested. I encourage you to learn more.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday February 11 2016, @02:35AM
The placebo effect is due to self-hypnosis from the user. Many placebo studies are looking completely in the wrong direction. Very few even bother to mention hypnosis and the researches probably don't know any better. But if you study hypnosis, placebo effects become far easier to predict and understand.
There are a lot of awesome things you can do with hypnosis and confirmed by scientific tests, like changing some chemical property of your skin to kill off warts, that the medical profession completely ignores. There's an older study demonstrating people can mentally control the firmness and size of their breasts to a certain degree. Tutorials on starting breastfeeding imply this as well. It involves mentally producing more of a certain chemical that promotes breast growth. If your brain can influence it, it can be influenced through hypnosis and thus through placebos. How isn't understood, but the can-it-be-done is demonstrated time and time again.