Part of placebo effect ascribed to cannabinoids

By Jonathan M. Gitlin | Published about an hour ago

In clinical trials, new drugs are often compared to older treatments, but sometimes they're also compared to placebos—inert treatments that ought to have no effect. Except that's not what happens. The placebo effect can actually be pretty strong, and even more strangely, placebos can work even when the patient knows they're being given one.

Most of what we know about placebos results from studies on how we process pain, since it's more ethical to give someone a placebo instead of a painkiller than it would be to replace an anti-cancer drug or insulin. Some of the analgesic (painkilling) effect of placebo treatment is due to endogenous opioids, ones made by the body. Now, evidence has emerged that suggests an additional effect results from the cannabinoid pathway, according to a publication in Nature Medicine.

Placebo-activated opioid analgesia doesn't work all the time. Experimentally, researchers can induce it by preconditioning a research subject with an actual opioid analgesic. Or, to explain that in plain English, you give the subject a painful stimulus then give them an opioid to treat it. You do this several times then, instead of giving them a real drug, you give them a placebo, which will block the pain. What's more, you can actually inhibit the action of the placebo by giving the subject an opioid antagonist like naloxone, which blocks the effect of opioids. Still with me? Good.

Here's where things get more complicated. You can also use a nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory (NSAID), like ibuprofen, to create a placebo analgesic effect. But this time, it can't be blocked with naloxone. So there's more than one biochemical pathway responsible for the analgesic effects of sugar pills. The new paper involves an attempt to look for alternate pathways.


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http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/10/is-the-placebo-effect-partially-caused-by-cannabinoids.ars

As encouraged as I was to read further evidence of the healing qualities of cannabis, the studies tell us more about the placebo effect than about the amazingly healthy effects of a daily toke.

I could be reading it wrong but it seemed to suggest that cannabinoids 'encourage' the placebo effect. I'm not surprised. After forty-five years of experimentation, I have been able to wean myself entirely off brand name pharmaceuticals.

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People can be conditioned through basic stimulus/response BF Skinner type conditioning to train their bodies to react in a certain way. This would be akin to a biofeedback response. That a person can evoke their own placebo effect even when they know it is a placebo is no news to me. Conditioned responses are like that! As an example, we may KNOW we don't have time to actually eat that great smelling barbecue that we smell as we walk down the street by the restaurant. That doesn't stop us from salivating. If we desire to salivate for some reason, we would thus introduce a desirable barbecue smell to our senses artificially. We salivate as a conditioned response even though we know we aren't going to eat the meal.

What is interesting about this article is that it goes further than that, and attaches it to a particular chemical pathway. Instead of salivating at the mere odor of a meal, we can activate the cannabinoid pathway as a conditioned response to a placebo. The same principles apply!

What an interesting article!