Expectations can relieve pain
To relieve a patient's pain, it can be effective to induce expectations. This finding is promising for optimising the effectiveness of treatments, conclude Kaya Peerdeman and colleagues in their article in PAIN.
Improving standard treatments
The findings of the health psychologist and her co-researchers show that expectation interventions are promising for optimising the effectiveness of standard analgesic treatments in clinical practice. Most notably, the observed effects underline the importance of the information a clinician provides when administering an analgesic treatment. Informing patients about the positive expected outcomes of an intervention, without neglecting possible negative side effects, can optimise treatment effectiveness.
The placebo effect and expectations
Peerdeman and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis, a method that combines the results of multiple studies. Previous studies have shown that expectations are important predictors of the outcome of analgesic (pain-relieving) treatments. Expectations can be influenced by verbal suggestions, conditioning or mental imagery. Participants in these studies can a receive treatment with or without the suggestion that it is a powerful analgesic. Conditioning involves the pairing of, for example, a placebo pill with reduced pain stimulation, after which the placebo itself can cause pain relief. An example of mental imagery is imagining feelings of pain-relieving warmth in painful areas.
Verbal suggestion most promising
Research on this type of interventions has been conducted mostly in healthy subjects. To investigate how well these findings translate to the clinic, Peerdeman and colleagues have now summarised the existing knowledge of the effects of expectation interventions on patients’ pain. The meta-analysis showed that brief expectation interventions can effectively relief various types of pain, like chronic back pain, recurrent migraine, or surgery pain. Verbal suggestion demonstrated the most promising effects. An example of such a verbal suggestion is: ‘The agent you have just been given is known to powerfully reduce pain in some patients’. Less studies were conducted in the area of conditioning and mental imagery, that both showed overall small to medium effects. The effects also varied depending on the type of pain, with the largest effect for pain caused by a medical procedure (e.g., surgery).
Relieving patients’ pain with expectation interventions: a meta-analysis was published in the June 2016 issue of PAIN, a leading journal in pain research.
Peerdeman is a PhD candidate in Prof. dr. Andrea Evers’ research group. This research was funded by Evers’ NWO Vidi grant.
In the media
Listen to the interview with Kaya Peerdeman on this topic (in Dutch):
Placebo-effect moet plek krijgen in behandeling - NPO Radio 1
