Amanda's Wellbeing Podcast

This week I discuss the placebo effect and the use of placebos in clinical trials with Dr Felicity Braithwaite, physiotherapist and scientific researcher at the University of South Australia.Clinical trials are used to assess whether an active ingredient or treatment is having a real health outcome. (In very lay terms) one method of achieving this is to take two groups of similar people, administer one group the active ingredient or treatment in question and the other group a sham, or placebo, ingredient or treatment. In ideal circumstances, the people in the trial do not know whether they are receiving the “real” treatment or the placebo; this is called blinding. Blinding is relatively easy to achieve in a drug trial - e.g. one group receives a pill with the active ingredient being tested and the other receives an identical looking inert pill, and the results are compared. The reason for blinding is to eliminate the placebo effect, that is, the positive effect on a person’s health after taking a placebo; bel