- Reaction score
- 340
I did some quick googling and it seems you may be right.Source? It can only induce things that can be psychological. If stress is a factor then placebo can help. Stress does not cause Androgenetic Alopecia. No placebo can reverse a genetic disease.
Google says placebo can alter heart rate and blood pressure, but those can be controlled by changes in psychological state.
There is this article which has things like this:
McKenzie (1896) reported an interesting ob-
servation relevant to the understanding of the
placebo effect in the immune system. In this
study, it was shown that some people who are
allergic to flowers show an allergic reaction
when presented with something that super-
ficially looks like a flower, but contains no
pollen (i.e., an artificial flower).
But the presumed mechanism there is classic Pavlovian conditioning, not placebo.
I did a bit of reading on placebo some years ago and I could have sworn I'd read about actual physical effects, but perhaps I misremembered, my bad.