Using Placebos to Relieve Pain

Placebo is considered a drug or other procedure with no pharmacological effects, used to relieve pain in the body. What it means by pharmacological effects is that it does not contain an active substance meant to affect health. It is considered anything that seems to be a “real” medical treatment but isn’t. They can be administered as a pill, shot, or some other type of fake treatment.

Most effects of placebos are to relieve pain, in which patients experience a decrease in such case. Medical scans of the brain and the spinal cord have shown a decreased response to pain as well. The placebo effect has focused on the relationship of mind and body how they related to each other and what similar or different characteristics they have in relationship. For example, one of the common theories is that this placebo effect is due to a person’s expectation. This means that if a person expects a pill to do something, it is possible that the body’s own chemistry with the help of his mind, it can cause effect similar to what a medication might have caused.

Just like the placebo effect can have positive effects on a patient, it can as well have negative effects. Some side effects that they might experience may be headaches, nausea, or drowsiness. A problem with the placebo effect is that it can be difficult to distinguish from the actual effects of a real drug during a study. There are studies that show that there are actual physical changes that occur with the placebo effect. Like an example with asthma patients, it shows less constriction of the bronchial tubes in patients for whom a placebo drug works. Other studies have documented increase in the body’s production of endorphins, one of the body’s natural pain relievers.

This means is that a placebo will be more likely to be effective if you maintain a positive mind that this pill will have a positive outcome when you use it. This video gives a general overview on how a placebo works, and why is it effective, it provides a few examples to show its effect. It also explains how in the past placebo effect wasn’t used as how it is used now by saying that now the placebo is being misused by patients when they experience pain.

Korsakoff's Syndrome

Now a days there are many possibilities someone can damage their brain, and not just physically, but also by substances we consume, if they are born with a brain deformity, illness. Korsakoff’s syndrome is a brain damage that is caused by a prolonged thiamine deficiency. This is associated with heavy alcohol consumption over a long period of time, which happens mostly to men between the ages of 45 and 65. This doesn’t mean that women can’t be affected; they are also exposed to this type of syndrome since they appear to be more vulnerable to the effects of alcohol at a slightly younger age than men.

The Korsakoff’s syndrome is caused by a lack of thiamine (vitamin B1); this affects the brain and nervous system. It affects mostly heavy drinkers with poor eating habits in which the diet does not contain essential vitamins. This system is likely to develop gradually, in which the damage might occur in important small areas deep within the brain, such as the dorsomedial thalamus, the main source of input to the prefrontal cortex, resulting in severe short-term memory loss. Some of the symptoms associated that a person might experience are, difficulty in acquiring new information or learning new skills, change in personality (person may show apathy), lack of insight into the condition, and confabulation. Confabulation is where a person invents events to fill the gaps in memory. Like for example, a person who has been in hospital for several weeks may talk convincingly about having just visited their aunt earlier that day.

Just like most diseases where a person becomes addicted to a drug, in this case alcohol, one of the treatments used to help them could be to adopt a healthy diet with vitamin supplements to start producing again the thiamine, at the same time abstain from alcohol. Recovery and improvements usually occur within a period of up to two years. The support from family and friends is also helpful, giving them advise and motivation to stop this addiction for their own benefit.

People might think that this just happens to heavy drinkers that consume alcohol every day, but if you are one of those people that consume alcohol at least once or twice a week you might want to stop and think for a second what you are doing to your own body. Not only you have a probability of becoming a heavy drinker in the future and possible getting Korsakoff’s syndrome, but you might also experience less damaging to your body such as liver problems, as well as social problems with the people that surround you.

This video is mute, but it explains through a series of slides how the Korsafoff’s syndrome affects the brain.

Cutting the Corpus Callosum

Most of cutting made to the corpus callosum are because damage to it might now be allowing the patients to match the concepts they see in one eye with the concepts in the other half of the brain. This implication might cause a trouble coordinating their hands preventing them from matching sensations on one hand with movement on the other because the information doesn’t get to where its needed.

Cuttings to the corpus callosum might also be to treat severe epilepsy, which is a condition characterized by repeated episodes of excessive synchronized neural activity which results from a mutation in a gene controlling the HABA receptor, from trauma or infection in the brain, brain tumors, or exposure to toxic substances.

The advantages and good benefits of cutting the corpus callosum is that when a person experiences seizure symptoms, the brain will have much more difficulty sending messages between the hemispheres, this means that the seizure will only occur in one side of the brain and it will be less severe.

Most of the time this is a well-developed surgery with little implications. It is still possible to experience risks such as bleeding, swelling, or an infection during the surgery. Other possible compilations might include mutism (which is the lack of speech), weakness of an extremity, or lack of bladder control.  Other rare risk children might experience is the change in behavior.

People that have undergone surgery to the corpus callosum are referred to as split-brain people; they still maintain their intellect, motivation, and walk without difficulty. An example of what a person with a split-brain might experience is if he or she is touching a mysterious object with only the left hand, while also receiving no visual cues in the right visual field, the patient cannot say out loud the name of that which the right side of the brain is touching. This is because (1) each cerebral hemisphere of the primary somatosensory cortex only contains a tactile representation of the opposite (contralateral) side of the body; (2) the speech-control center is on the left side of the brain; (3) the communication between the two sides of the brain is inhibited.  

This video shows at first how the brain functions when you cut the nerves that connect both hemispheres, and they also show behavioral experiments with an adult that went through this surgery, how the brain reacts with this condition.