Study: The placebo effect works even when people know they are taking a placebo

Place­bos Prove Pow­er­ful, Even When Peo­ple Know They’re Tak­ing One, New Study Sug­gests (MSU release): How much of a treat­ment is mind over mat­ter? It is well doc­u­ment­ed that peo­ple often feel bet­ter after tak­ing a treat­ment with­out active ingre­di­ents sim­ply because they believe it’s real — known as the place­bo effect. A team of…

Read More

Mind Hacks and the Placebo Effect

In the ETech pan­el a few days ago, we dis­cussed some futur­is­tic and some emerg­ing ways in which we can “hack our minds”, most­ly from a tech­nol­o­gy point of view. Nei­ther myself nor the oth­er pan­elists thought of sug­gest­ing the most obvi­ous and inex­pen­sive method, proven in thou­sands of research stud­ies. The secret com­pound?: Belief. Also…

Read More

Attention deficits: drugs, therapy, cognitive training

Shel­ley launched a good dis­cus­sion on The Neu­ro­science of ADHD in her blog, dis­cussing the sit­u­a­tion and pro­vid­ing a tech­ni­cal overview of drug-based inter­ven­tions. Some­thing I had­n’t heard is that “For exam­ple, babies born pre­ma­ture­ly face a sig­nif­i­cant­ly greater risk of devel­op­ing ADHD than full-term babies (socioe­co­nom­ic sta­tus was con­trolled for).” Which helps me better…

Read More

Potential Nutritional Treatment for ADD/ADHD

Dr. David Rabin­er’s Atten­tion Research Update drew my atten­tion to a recent spate of research arti­cles on the poten­tial of omega‑3 fat­ty acid dietary sup­ple­men­ta­tion to help treat ADD/ADHD. Stim­u­lant med­ica­tion for chil­dren with ADD/ADHD has been the pre­dom­i­nant treat­ment for years. Thus far, it has been quite suc­cess­ful, but we have yet to see the long term effects of chron­ic med­ica­tion. Giv­en that, it is worth at least inves­ti­gat­ing alter­na­tive ther­a­pies that can be used either in place of or in con­junc­tion with tra­di­tion­al phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal and behav­ioral treat­ment. As one of the four pil­lars of brain health, nutri­tion has a sig­nif­i­cant impact on both phys­i­cal struc­tures in the body and behav­ior. Nutri­tion­al research though is often dif­fi­cult to con­duct. It is uneth­i­cal to with­hold essen­tial nutri­ents from peo­ple and nutri­ents work syn­er­gis­ti­cal­ly, which makes it dif­fi­cult to dis­cern the effect of one nutri­ent ver­sus another.

Read More