Placebo effects include biological responses that can be measured in objective ways such as heart rate and blood pressure, observable allergic reaction, immune response in blood samples, or healing of tissue. For some drugs for psychological problems, we can measure the effects of a placebo medication/procedure/ritual causing release of dopamine in specific areas of the brain - again, an objective measurement of a real effect caused by the placebo treatment.
The effect of placebo's certainly is not limited to subjective feelings of improvement, it actually causes people to not only feel better, but be better up to a certain amount. Some medicines give significantly better results than a placebo, and some medicines, well, don't - so in that case they're probably placebos in essence.
I'm not even sure if what you describe would be called a placebo effect in medical literature - if objective measurements say they're doing awful, then we count it as a failure, period, and not an expression of the placebo.
Placebo effects include biological responses that can be measured in objective ways such as heart rate and blood pressure, observable allergic reaction, immune response in blood samples, or healing of tissue.
That's a very specific claim, and I would expect it to be published in a medical journal article that we can all look up if it is true. More than that, if this claim is generally accepted, it will be found in authoritative medical textbooks used to train medical practitioners. I have resources for looking up references like that--I go to my alma mater university library just about weekly to look up facts about things I read here on Hacker News. Do you have any references for anything you have read on this topic?
Meanwhile, I am sure that if any of our friends here on Hacker News are (may it never be) injured in a car crash, they are not going to go look for placebo treatments, but for actually effective treatments. The medical researchers who look at the issue with proper study designs and statistical controls know that placebos are essentially useless, as they at most have influence just on self-reported subjective symptoms, not on any sign that affects the progression of a disease or maintenance of good health.[1] This topic keeps coming up over and over and over here on Hacker News because most participants here have heard about this issue only in popular press reports or blog posts that are mostly wrong. I encourage you and all our friends here to take some more time and effort to learn more about the actual research base before assuming that a placebo can change your heart rate over the long term, reduce allergy symptoms (I know all about those), or heal tissue. (Which tissue?)
Findings on placebo effects by researchers who have considered the issue carefully include
"Despite the spin of the authors – these results put placebo medicine into crystal clear perspective, and I think they are generalizable and consistent with other placebo studies. For objective physiological outcomes, there is no significant placebo effect. Placebos are no better than no treatment at all."[2]
"We did not find that placebo interventions have important clinical effects in general. However, in certain settings placebo interventions can influence patient-reported outcomes, especially pain and nausea, though it is difficult to distinguish patient-reported effects of placebo from biased reporting. The effect on pain varied, even among trials with low risk of bias, from negligible to clinically important. Variations in the effect of placebo were partly explained by variations in how trials were conducted and how patients were informed."[3]
The effect of placebo's certainly is not limited to subjective feelings of improvement, it actually causes people to not only feel better, but be better up to a certain amount. Some medicines give significantly better results than a placebo, and some medicines, well, don't - so in that case they're probably placebos in essence.
I'm not even sure if what you describe would be called a placebo effect in medical literature - if objective measurements say they're doing awful, then we count it as a failure, period, and not an expression of the placebo.