The Placebo Effect - Is it real or just imagined?

After reading the articles and learning more about placebo effects I got a better undestanding on what it was, in the articles it is said that the ´´placebo effect is the measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health or behavior not attributable to a medication or invasive treatment that has been administered.´´ This tells us that it is a was of curring people with out actually giving them real medication  and, it makes you feel better as you asume what you are given will give you stability. THe whole idea about the placebo effect was invented by  H. K. Beecher.  He evaluated 15 clinical trials concerned with different diseases and found that 35% of 1,082 patients were satisfactorily relieved by a placebo alone he found out that for some people pills worked in order to satisfy their needs and believing it what they were taking gave them more life. Many other diffrent test were done and provided the testers with diffrent informations.Psychologist have came to conclutions which informs us that placebos work because consumers on the pill believe the will be healed by the pill and they mostly tell us that it depends on the state of mind. Our thought and mind have the ability to get us into better situation and help us overcome illnesses we just have to belive. Before any medication exsited sold by pharmaseutics many illnesses were cured by placebos. Many researchers found out that beecher was right and that placebos did work and could cure sickness like stomatch pain, depression etc. One of the greatest limitations about this expirement was that Beecher did not give the results on data  and that doctors did not know how patients would respond to the placebo, and instead of being cured they could be more dammaged. IN my opinion i belive placeboes helps since they have no side effects and people have been helped by them intead of being druged will real medications.I also belife that the some of the data provided by Beecher helped save lives and learn more about how it can work. What mostly came to my attention is how psychologist are write humans have the power in their mind its all in the head you can either think possitive and get better results or be negitive and never get better.

Alzheimer's Disease

As we were shown in class the diffrent cases of Alzheimer´s I learned first of all that it is not a diseas that any human being decided to have or has the option to make it go away. After watching the video one of the most importants things I saw was that this disease does not only affect the person with it but it affects mostly thier family members or people important to them. Lossing your mind , forgetting thing, halusinating, forgetting events in your life and names , are some of the few effects that alzheimer has. as said in the article ¨Alzheimer's disease — the degenerative brain condition that is not content to kill its victims without first snuffing out their essence — has for decades simply laughed at such efforts.¨ This disease will eventually kill you but slowly it makes you completly loss control and you stop understanding what is around you.You no longer understand reality from fiction. THey still haven´t found any cure for this and every year more people are affected by it. Something that also comes to my atention is that medicins and puzzels just help your mind be good for a while but after a certain amount of time it will all go away. I think that thier should be more reasearch and more doctors and `specialist trying to find a cure for alzheimers since it is and uncontrolled sickness since there is still no cure for it and death still comes with it. If i were in that position of taking care and visiting someone in that position i would have more understanding in the way family members suffer, as they realize that the person they love simply gets worst instead of improving, and they don´t know when the day will come when they completly forget about them. Eventhought they can maintaing someone with alzheimers alive for a long time i dont think you can call that living anymore because their are no memories no good moments, everything vanishis slowly and what you used to know is gone.

http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,2025369,00.html#ixzz14HeSNFeQ

MEMORY

There is an idea that women can remeber things better than men, and this is being discussed in the first article. Psychologists Agneta Herlitz and Jenny Rehnman in Stockholm, Sweden, found out that significant sex differences in episodic memory, were women can remember better past memories in a long-term. The results state that women were able to remeber verbal stuf better such as: remembering words, objects, pictures or everyday events but men were able to do better than women at remebering remembering symbolic, non-linguistic information. But, there are some sex differences that indicate that women can remember better things that are verbal and visuospacial. Also, women are better at remembering and recognizing the faces of women, more than those of men because they pay better attention to them. "To determine this particular finding, the psychologists presented three groups of participants with black and white pictures of hairless, androgynous faces and described them as ‘female faces,’ ‘male faces’ or just ‘faces.’ The findings indicate that women were able to remember the androgynous faces presented as female more accurately than the androgynous faces presented as male." The fact that women remeber things better than men can be deducted from the educational differences.

The second article talks about how researchers are discovering that our culture helps shape how we remember our past--and how far back our memory stretches. Researchers believe that humans have what Freud called "childhood amnesia" because they cannot remember any event before certain age. What is interesting is that the time in which this effect ended in each person changes throughout each culture. For example, for some poeple it might have ended at the age of 4, but for others it was at their 2.5 years. They believe that people who grow up in a society that focuses on individual personal history and on personal family history will vary in their memory abilities. The study conducted on the caucasians and the Asians, clearly demonstartes how the memories varied from each culture. They also found out how mothers also influence on the memory of each child. There are some moms who elaborate more on talking about certain past events to their child's but others simply ask closed questions and don't ask about past events. "To many Americans, she says, this lack of interest in ones own or others' personal pasts violates what we think of as a truism--that the fundamental thing that makes us who we are is our personal memories." Many cultures believed that personal memorie's are not important and simply don't try to remember them.
Overall, Leichtman says, "It's not yet an old idea" that culture influences memory. "Right now we're really refining it and working out the wide variety of mechanisms that cause it."

http://www.apa.org/monitor/sep05/culture.aspx
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/02/080220104244.htm