Sci-stuff: The placebo effect

The principle of 'mind over matter' is something that has led to amazing physical feats by humans, which include walking barefoot on hot coals without getting burned, or lying on a bed of nails without becoming hole-y as opposed to holy. We kick off this brand-new column with one such feat of the human body, which has continued to baffle scientists over the years.

Don't try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. Apart from that, we simply don't know.

Benedetti has since shown that a saline placebo can also reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson's disease. He and his team measured the activity of neurons in the patients' brains as they administered the saline. They found that individual neurons in the subthalamic nucleus (a common target for surgical attempts to relieve Parkinson's symptoms) began to fire less often when the saline was given, and with fewer "bursts" of firing - another feature associated with Parkinson's.

The neuron activity decreased at the same time as the symptoms improved: the saline was definitely doing something.

We have a lot to learn about what is happening here, Benedetti says, but one thing is clear: the mind can affect the body's biochemistry. "The relationship between expectation and therapeutic outcome is a wonderful model to understand mind-body interaction," he says. Researchers now need to identify when and where placebo works. There may be diseases in which it has no effect. There may be a common mechanism in different illnesses. As yet, we just don't know

By Asifur Rahman Khan

I had resigned myself to my fate. I was prepared to do my duty and be utterly bored to tears in the middle of strangers for the next hour or two. New neighbours had moved into the next apartment and I had been forced into being my family's ambassador in the customary milad; since I am the youngest, everybody else just assumed that I have nothing better to do with my life.

I entered the apartment, trying to look as well behaved and docile as possible, and was shown into the ladies' quarters. A bunch of extremely healthy & inquisitive “Aunties” were there too, waiting to interrogate me about my ambitions and the purpose of my life, as well as heap their children's fantastic results like burning coal on my head and do a very good job in making me feel small and inadequate.

Thankfully, I didn't have to grit my teeth and endure the torture for too long, for the milad started pretty soon. The religious speaker was conducting the ceremony at the other end of the house, so he was quite inaudible; all I heard was the sentence “let us celebrate the miracles of God,” and a few words here and there about angels, the bounties of heaven and the need to pray five times a day so that we can take advantage of these bounties. Since I could barely hear a thing and personally did not share the opinion that fasting and praying is all we need to do to get into heaven, I killed time by studying what everybody else in that room was doing.

Apparently, I wasn't the only one not paying attention. Most of the women there, with covers on their heads and prayer beads in a few hands, were droning on and on about the latest gossip whose marriage was on the rocks, who wore a sari that didn't even cost Tk. 3000 (The nerve of that woman!), whose son went into rehab (It must have been her fault, children always take after their parents) and so on. In the middle of this lively and not at all offensive conversation, another lady rambled into the room, barked a few orders at the maidservant who retreated to the farthest corner of the room, and joined the chitchat. She was accompanied by a 9 year old girl and a toddler.

This soft, sunshiny lump of mush, drool and baby powder was the most adorable toddler I've ever seen! He was wearing a little cap, which was at the moment his most prized possession, and went around the whole room showing everyone his treasure and gurgling with pleasure. Then he pointed to the direction of the speaker who was conducting the milad and murmured “Allah shobaike ador kore!” (Allah loves everyone!) and bumped down on the floor to examine his chubby, little feet. Then suddenly he got up, ran towards his sister and hugged her with all this might and gave her a sloppy, baby kiss, after which he ran to the maidservant at the corner of the room, gave her the same bear hug and looked up at her face with an indescribably loving and innocent expression. If I could describe the tenderness and affection in that smile and how it obviously warmed the hearts of everyone surrounding this delightful little creature, starting from the little maid to his sister and all the gossipy Aunties, then I would consider myself to be a good writer.

All I can say is that this beautiful baby, who opened his arms to each and every person in that room with cheerful readiness and who found such delight and contentment in such small things, who looked at everyone with the same good natured smile and taught me more about the greatness of God then the speaker of a religious ceremony; this child completely bewitched me. I didn't pay any more attention to the milad and spent the rest of the evening in letting him rummage through my purse and making absurd faces to make him laugh his captivating, sunny laugh. What better way to celebrate the miracles of God then that?

By Shuprova Tasneem

Buying Toothpaste

The whole toothpaste thing used to really scare me, and it wasn't just about toothpaste, it was all the little things that you don't usually think about- it was cotton buds and toilet paper and Kleenex, it was the salt and pepper that is always in the salt and pepper shakers whenever I need it. When any of the above ever ran out, it appeared again without my ever having to do anything about it. If I needed a new toothbrush, I opened this magic drawer in my parents' dresser, and there it was, a spare toothbrush just waiting for me. These things were just part of my everyday, you didn't stop to muse about it or anything; they were just taken care of.

Then it hit me, pretty hard, I have to say, that I was leaving this safe comfortable haven to go off to a place where I would actually have to think about the little things, because if I didn't buy the shampoo, there wouldn't be any shampoo at the side of the tub. It wasn't really the actual act of having to go and purchase those things, it was more about what it seemed to represent.I was going off to college, I was going to have to get a job and support myself. It wasn't the whole working thing that freaked me out, that I could deal with, was even looking forward to it, but the fact that I would have to earn money and then manage it? That I'd have to put away a portion of my earnings for mundane things like soap and lotion and be responsible for every little insignificant detail of my life? That kind of unnerved me. I called my brilliant sister long distance with my minor crisis of nerves and like all brilliant people tend to do, she talked the stupidity out of me. We remembered a time years ago when she used to be too shy and afraid to go up to the McDonald's counter and order her meal by herself, and when she dreaded having to be the one to pay the cashier at Sears. Now, my sister is working four jobs on campus, has headed the South Asian cultural shows two years running and has chilled with Clinton, the important one (Hillary, of course!). She has traveled around the world alone and spent a year in France. She never thought she'd be able to do those things but when put in those situations, she sucked it up and did what she had to do. After our chat, I felt better equipped to deal with my small panic attack, and it was clear that even a spoilt codependent brat like me would be able to handle it when push came to shove; I know now that I can definitely do it- I can the goddamn toothpaste.

By 'Non-Smoker'