Placebo Effect

The placebo effect is a beneficial effect, produced by a placebo drug or treatment, that cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient's belief in that treatment. The patient believes the placebo is a normal pharmacological substance that will cure their pain and because they believe it will in some cases it does even if it is a tablet without effect. This idea was presented by H.K. Beecher who evaluated 15 clinical trials with different problems and found that 35% of the people he tested were cured by a placebo alone and 66.7% of the patient’s conditions were improved. Since then, many studies have been done with higher results. These placebos have been effective for people with any pain, depression, heart ailments, gastric ulcers and other stomach issues. Many other studies were done concerning the efficiency of the placebo effect and some discuss it does not really work. Before real pharmaceutics medicine was used, there were only placebos. The limitations of the placeboes are that sometimes doctors don’t know if maybe the placebo is not going to be effective and may worsen the patient’s health. I think that for minor health problems such as a cold or depression the placebo effect might be efficient but for major diseases it should not prescribed. The placebo effect can also have many beneficial results so it should not be discarded because it can still be very cheap and easier for many people but it should also me accompanied by other medicines so that it is not risky.

These articles explain how gender and cultural differences affect the way and how long we retain memory. For example, Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Sweden discovered that women can remember more about everyday events than men. The results of their experiments indicated that women do extremely well in verbal episodic memory tasks and men were better than woman at visuospatial processing. To get to these conclusions the psychologists made an experiment in which three groups of participants where presented with black and white pictures of hairless, asexual faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The results show that women could remember the ‘female’ faces better than they could remember the ‘male’ faces. This shows us how gender affects memory in different ways.

Psychologist, Michelle Leichtman, tries to explain how different cultures have particular factors that may shape memory. She ives many examples. One of them is that if you ask someone tha comes from the Unisted States, a country that focuses a lot in their history, about the earliest memory they have they might tell you about some event when they were about 3. But if you ask the same thing to an Asian, a culture that values independence more than personal history, they will probably tell you about a memory they have when they were 4 or more. So, according to this we can observe that how long you retain a memory may vary depending on your culture. These discoveries have been results of studies made in the past. Mary Mullen and Harlene Hayne both did studies trying to find how differences between cultures affect memory. Mullen asked 700 Caucasians and Asians about their earliest memory and found an average difference that Caucasians’ memory was 6 moths earlier than Asian’s. Then Hayne found that Maoris’ culture helped them retain memory longer than Caucasians. To explain this Michelle Leichthman and some colleagues investigates and found that high-elaborative mothers talk a lot to their children about the past, while low-elaborative mothers don’t talk much about the past. So, they found that Maori mothers are high-elaborative mothers compared to Asian mothers. This explains to us how culture can affect our memory.

Alzheimer’s disease is a problem in the brain that affects your memory. The symptoms develop slowly and get worse through the years to a point that it interferes with daily activities. This disease is progressive and irreversible it slowly destroys memory and thinking skills and eventually the ability of completing basic tasks. When the disease is advanced the patient can no longer respond to the environment, they might become mute or stop eating. Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia. Alzheimer’s is not a normal part of aging but as you get older the possibilities if having the disease increase. Most patients with Alzheimer’s are 65 or older. Alzheimer’s is one of the leading causes of death in America, but the most frightening part of the disease is that there is no current cure. Although there is no cure, there are some treatments that help slow down the worsening symptoms and improve the quality of life for the patients. The most common early symptom is having difficulty remembering new information. As the disease develops other symptoms may appear such as forgetting basic things you have done for your whole life. Another example of a symptom of a patient in the severe stage of Alzheimer’s is that the person may not be able to recognize his father or daughter. This disease is one of the priorities for many labs; it has been killing people for many years and will keep on doing if scientists don’t find a cure for it. It may be terrifying but it is the true, Alzheimer’s is an average person’s fear of getting older.