Research
our mind can be a powerful healing tool when given the chance. The idea that your brain can convince your body a fake treatment is the real thing — the so-called placebo effect — and thus stimulate healing has been around for millennia. Now science has found that under the right circumstances, a placebo can be just as effective as traditional treatments. The placebo effect is more than positive thinking — believing a treatment or procedure will work. It’s about creating a stronger connection between the brain and body and how they work together. Placebos won’t lower your cholesterol or shrink a tumor. Instead, placebos work on symptoms modulated by the brain, like the perception of pain. Placebos may make you feel better, but they will not cure you. They have been shown to be most effective for conditions like pain management, stress-related insomnia, and cancer treatment side effects like fatigue and nausea.
https://www.health.harvard.edu/newsletter_article/the-power-of-the-placebo-effect
Clinical trials have shown that placebo will have a strong psychological suggestion on patients, making people feel more positive about treatment, and the effect will be better than doing nothing. However, due to the current small sample size and the time period of the study, the study of placebo is not yet mature.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6930978/
Thought
After that, I came up with the following two thoughts：
- Online consultations and the purchase of OCT drugs have become the new trend, and many official hospitals and pharmacies in China have opened official accounts on social media. This new way of buying medicines has many advantages, it can save time, and at the same time, it can also cover some areas where it is difficult to buy medicines. At the same time, drugs sold online are not unbeneficial. Many drugs are sold to some patients in an exaggerated form, but the placebo effect may make these patients feel more comfortable by relieving symptoms such as anxiety, pain, and insomnia. Although it is not an effective disease treatment, it also benefits patients by providing them with a certain degree of physical and mental relief. So I decided to change my question. I think in this case, the decision should be put back in the hands of the buyer, rather than rejecting all the drugs sold online, as I thought before. My new question is: How can I help elderly people make better decisions when they buy pharmaceutical products on social media in China?
- After I researched a lot of information, I found that there was a lot of information gap between people and the drugs sold online. There’s a lot of this information, and a lot of it is technical terms that aren’t easy to understand. So I want to build a platform where I can share information with people and thus help them buy medicines on social media.