placebo.

[jakeypoo]

hello, im new to these forums and see loads of people talking about 'placebo'. now i really dont know what this is and nobody uses this word from my parts :(
anyone care to explain what this famous 'placebo' is?

thankyou
:rastasmoke:
spleeee up on me :D

[auzzzy]

A placebo is a preparation which is pharmacologically inert but which may have a medical effect based solely on the power of suggestion, a response known as the placebo effect or placebo response. [wikipedia definition]

An example of this could of be when non-alcoholic alcohol were put into the big brother house a few years ago and yet the housemates still act as if they were drunk.

So in other words, it's not so much the alcohol effecting the way they are but them adapting themselves to how they feel they should be acting from drinking it.

[jakeypoo]

\Hey cool:) good example i think i understand now :D

thanks dude =]

[FakeBoobsRule]

They don't use the word placebo in Great Britain? Well a placebo effect is when someone takes a substance that has no effect but mentally they expect it to have an effect or think it has an effect and thus they receive an effect. I imagine you have seen here where someone may smoke smoking that shouldn't get them high because it was dirt weed but they feel baked of their ass? My self made definition was bad so let me help you with official definitions .

placebo effect: The beneficial effect in a patient following a particular treatment that arises from the patient's expectations concerning the treatment rather than from the treatment itself.

placebo: a medication prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on a disorder (2) : an inert or innocuous substance used especially in controlled experiments testing the efficacy of another substance (as a drug) b : something tending to soothe

Ok, see it normally is used in medicine like giving a patient a pill that is nothing more than sugar and telling them it will help and because they expect it to help, they get better. You can fools children really easily with this. Most drug trials are done as double blind studies where half the group gets the investigational drug and the other half gets a placebo because if you didn't give it to them, the results of the clinical trial would be off because half would otherwise get nothing and they might actually "feel worse." Also, they keep who is getting placebo and drug from those who are conducting the study until the very.

So I am guessing in the context of this board you may have seen someone get high that smoked dirt weed from placebo effect or smoked a ball of tar thinking it was full of resin and thought they were high or "got higher" because someone said this bag of mids was really kush, etc.

[birdgirl73]

Jakey, a placebo is typically a medicine or substance that has no action except by what it makes the recipient/patient think it does. If I recall correctly, the term itself means "pleasing" or "it pleases."

Placebos can work just as effectively as real medicines when they work, at least in the right people. Similarly they can cause negative effects in people, too. From what I've been taught, legitimate doctors don't really prescribe any type of placebos, but they are used in pharmaceutical testing or clinical trials, where placebos are given to the control groups to scientifically test the groups that are receiving the active medicines that are being tested.

You can read all about the concept here.

Placebo - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo)

If you want some examples of placebos in action, we can make some up for you. A good cannabis-related one might be ground hemp leaf or oregano (something that doesn't have the active compounds in cannabis) in place of real cannabis bud with trichomes and THC content. In a person who who was susceptible to either positive or negative placebo effect, smoked hemp leaves might make him high as a kite, when in reality it was just the power of suggestion causing that result. As a negative placebo effect, smoking something completely cannabis free might make a person freak out or get jittery or paranoid, when it wasn't doing that at all.

Does that help?

[birdgirl73]

Dang, FBR beat me to the punch! I should have refreshed this page before I posted my reply. He's always faster on the draw than me. . . .

[Storm Crow]

A sugar pill. Doctors used to give them to hypochondriac patients. The patients wouldn't shut up about their "illnesses" and demanded SOMETHING! So the doc would pull out a sugar pill and the give stern warnings about not using too much. Patient shuts up, doctor can get back to finding out if anything is really wrong.

What is weird, is that the symptoms would go away! Sometimes even when there was a REAL problem! That is the placebo effect.

Now, I imagine someone has told you that all of cannabis' healing power is just a placebo effect. If this is so, please have them click the link in my sig! I think I have made the perfect argument that cannabis has much more than just a placebo effect on many conditions and illnesses! Have a great New Year! - Granny:hippy:

[jakeypoo]

yeahh splendid thanks a lot everyone :D

[psychocat]

They don't use the word placebo in Great Britain? .

Yes we do , anyone who knows a little about medicine , biology or chemistry will have come across the term "placebo effect".