The placebo effect is part of a general framework of meaning that underlies our common view of humanness as including sensitivity to pain. It has long been asserted by those who devalue people with intellectual disabilities (and other devalued communities, for that matter) that "they" don't experience pain the same way that "we" do. I have heard that less and less over the years, but I have to wonder if that isn't just de-valuers learning that there is a price to pay for the explicit voicing of hateful beliefs. The placebo effect is one of those consummate socially generated emblems of common humanity. This study says that superficial signs of intellectual disability are no indicator of deep social connection. Sorry for the rant.......
Contrary to earlier beliefs, people with severe congenital intellectual disability are sensitive to placebo-like effects, new research from Karolinska Institutet shows, published in the scientific journal Neurology. The results suggest that the influence of implicit social signals on expectancy effects has been underestimated.
The placebo effect is an example of how the power of the mind may influence the functions of the body, such as when a simple sugar pill alleviates pain when the taker believes it to be a real analgesic.
But placebo-like effects also occur when expectations influence the efficacy of real drugs. Until now, placebo researchers have presumed that this type of expectancy effect requires higher-order intellectual functions, such as reasoning, abstract thinking and predicting the future. But it now turns out to be more complex than that.
“Our results challenge the existing ideas of how treatment expectations are formed and we can now propose other more intuitive processes as a possible basis of the placebo effect, such as the ability to internalise the expectations of the people around you,” says Karin Jensen, assistant professor at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience.