As a skateboarder I spend a lot of time on my skateboard which eventually leads to me falling off of my skateboard. Falling is inevitable in skateboarding so it was in my best interest to learn how take the falls without letting them hurt too much. After years of skateboarding most minor scrapes and bumps don’t really bother me too much and I generally keep skateboarding if the injury is not too bad. I’ve also noticed that the pain of an injury is usually worse if I keep thinking about how it hurts, whereas if I tell myself that it doesn’t hurt that bad then it almost immediately starts to feel better. This lead me to the hypothesis that pain we feel after an injury is mostly in our mind and based on how bad we think it hurts. Another example I can think of that I’m sure many of you can relate would be when you hit your shin on a coffee table; While this hurts a lot initially, as long as you didn’t chip or break your shin bone, in theory the pain should subside very shortly after because no major damage was done. But sometimes the pain from hitting your shin feels like it lingers around for another minute or two after it has made contact with the coffee table. Based off my personal observation again, the pain from an incident like this goes away much faster if you think that it doesn’t hurt that bad versus thinking something along the lines of “My shin hurts so bad… This pain won’t go away”. I believe the placebo effect plays a big part in how we perceive pain and how bad an injury hurts.   

Source – https://openclipart.org/image/2400px/svg_to_png/218053/Pain_Scale__Arvin61r58.png

A recent study published in the journal Pain found that patients who knowingly took a placebo pill for their lower back pain saw more improvement in reducing their back pain than those who were given traditional treatment alone. 97 patients suffering from chronic lower back pain were given a 15-minute explanation of what the placebo effect is before they were given their pills so they are well aware of what a placebo pill is. After they were given the explanation the patients were then split randomly into two groups; Treatment-as-usual (TAU) group or open-label placebo (OLP). Participants in both groups were taking anti-inflammatories before this study began and were instructed to keep taking the anti-inflammatories if they regularly take them and not to make any other major lifestyle changes such as starting a new exercise regimen or take a new medication, which could impact their pain levels. The patients in the OLP group were also given a medicine bottle labeled “placebo pills” and were instructed to take two pills per day. The pills contained no active medication for pain relief. After three weeks the OLP group overall reported 30 percent reductions in both usual pain and maximum pain. Usual pain being the amount of pain that is normally felt on a daily basis and maximum pain being the worst amount of pain they feel overall. Those numbers compare well to the TAU group which reported 9 percent reduction for overall pain and 16 percent reduction for maximum pain. The placebo group also saw a 29 percent reduction in pain-related disability whereas the TAU group saw little to no improvement in that category. That is an amazing difference for a pill that does nothing at all to help with pain.

Source – http://www.roboticstrends.com/images/wide/pills.jpg

This experiment strongly correlates with the idea that pain is mostly in our head and we can make it go away with our own thoughts. When patients are being tested and given pills from doctors, it may make the placebo effect even stronger because the patients believe the doctor’s pills and instructions truly will make them feel better. I believe that this was a key part of this experiment working so well. 

Study Source – http://thescienceexplorer.com/brain-and-body/knowingly-taking-placebo-pills-reduces-pain-study-finds