Effective remedy or placebo effect?

Effective remedy or placebo effect? The placebo effect. The placebo effect is the phenomenon by which the symptoms of a patient can be improved by treatment with a harmless substance, that is, a substance without effects directly related to the treatment of symptoms or disease. The physiological explanation postulated for this phenomenon would be the stimulation of a specific area of ​​the brain that would result in the improvement of the patient's symptom picture. That is to say: the patient himself can be influenced by the sensation of being treated or the hope of healing, and as a result he may find himself better or even facilitate recovery. This phenomenon does not work with the same efficacy in all patients or with all diseases. Medical studies to validate medications and treatments for any disease or ailment use placebos. In this way, it can be controlled when the symptoms improve by this phenomenon and adequately analyze the effectiveness of the treatment. When a treatment does not work significantly better than placebo, it is considered ineffective and inadequate for that disease and can not be prescribed. In Spain, homeopathic treatments are the exception and, according to the current legislation, modified in 1994, they do not have to demonstrate any efficacy. That is, they can only function as placebos. In addition to the use of placebos, scientific studies use so-called double and triple blind strategies that prevent the researcher from knowing whether the prescribed treatment is placebo or not. In this way, researchers are prevented from evaluating the improvement subjectively and conditioned by their prejudices. Some studies have succeeded in showing that the successive dissolutions of the substance that causes symptoms of various diseases end up completely disappearing all the rest of it, so the principle on which homeopathy is based would be refuted. However, experts in this discipline defend their effectiveness by appealing to the memory effect of water. According to this theory, water can remember the substances with which it has come into contact and acquire, in a certain way, some of its properties (in this case, cure the symptoms that the substance, in large quantities, causes). Other studies claim that homeopathic treatments should be used in a complementary way with pharmacological treatments, since they would have a placebo effect. The defenders of this theory defend that the patient himself can be influenced by the perception of receiving an effective treatment, but really it would be a harmless substance, that is, without effects directly related to the treatment of the symptoms of a disease. The scientific explanation is given by the stimulation of an area of ​​the brain of the patient to believe that the treatment will end with the pathology, which would result in the improvement of symptoms.