The Placebo Effect - is it real or just imagined?

In my opinion, the Placebo Effect is a special occasion when you are given a "Placebo" pill which means that the pill is fake. The pill can simply be sugar or anything else that wont make your pain go away, but once you take the pill, your brain starts to think that you are going to feel better because you already drank a pill for it. That is how the placebo effect works. In the class we have learned many different cases in which Placebo pills have worked for a lot of people that have a really messed up situation. For example, there can be fake operations in which the whole procedure of sleeping the person and cutting you open is done, and all of a sudden the person starts feeling better because he thinks that he had the surgery already.

Henry Beecher is a famous psychologist that made a paper called the Powerful Placebo and it was really an impact. While this paper did not introduce the idea of placebo reactions, its importance was that it stressed—for the first time—the necessity of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. In his 1955 paper, Beecher only speaks of placebo effects on specific occasions when he is contrasting them with drug effects.


These studies have problems like for example, the people that are being tested might think that they are being fooled when they are told that they were taking placebo pills. 
In my opinion, I think that Placebo pills have been a great discovery because maybe with these pills some doctors can cure incredible cure-free diseases and it is a great invention!

Alzheimer´s Disease

I have read the first article on alzheimer and it has really shocked me that more than 5 million Americans currently suffer from alzheimer´s disease and it will keep on growing and it will never stop just like AIDS.
It is funny how each and every second that passes there are more and more people dying because of smoking problems or more people are being born with each second that passes.

 But also, every second that passes there is a new person that is diagnosed with Alzheimers disease and the ugly part about this is that we can not do anything to prevent having it or to cure the sickness.

In my personal opinion, Alzheimer´s is one of the most cruel and devastating deaths because it makes you suffer a lot and its not only the diagnosed person that suffers: it is also the person´s family that suffers because of it´s symptoms. If a cure is not found fast for this sickness, it will become a really menace to the world just like yellow fever and small pox sometime killed many people. To beat this sickness, first we have to recruit volunteers to join a study that can help identify who is at greatest risk of developing the condition. The results could paint a clearer picture of the factors that put people in danger. People have searched for the answer but have failed to find it.

Alzheimer´s most casually strikes on old people and more women than men.