Wired magazine reports that the placebo effect is getting stronger. Really: It seems our brain now responds more powerfully to false treatments than it did twenty or thirty years ago. This isn’t just a nice bit of trivia; it has the potential to change the pharmaceutical business as we know it. In order for a new drug to be approved, it has to prove its effectiveness. To do this, it has to beat placebos. And if it’s getting harder and harder for drugs to beat placebos, then it’s going to be harder to get new drugs to market.
Why is this happening?
One reason might be marketing: Drug companies are very good at raising our expectations, and with these high expectations of effectiveness, so too comes a high strength of the placebo effect. Also, many designer drugs are targeting more refined areas of the brain—no longer are we bludgeoning basic brain functions with the mallet of thorazine. Instead, drug companies are targeting higher-order disorders like social anxiety and various, precisely defined dysphorias. These dysfunctions live in the brain functions of expectation, evaluation, and prediction—the same functions that create the placebo effect.