This link has been bookmarked by 105 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Lakshmi Vyasarajan.
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Sarah LewisAn excellent summary of a bunch of scientific mysteries—everything from the placebo effect to dark matter to cosmic rays that have too much energy. It'll probably take 15 minutes or so to read it but it's worth it.
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Hrothgar GrendelsonHurt people for 4 days and then give them morphine. On the 5th day, give them saline solution and the pain still goes away unless you lace the saline with naloxone, which is a morphine blocker. Shocker, the placebo effect is biochemical rather than some
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DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away. This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared. So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know.
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10 Jun 05
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