There are 13 unexplained mysteries. The absence or presence of methane on Mars is one of the unknowns. (Photo: NASA) RELATED NEWS MADRID .- For millennium man tries to use technology and scientific advances to address some of the mysteries of this planet and the space around us. The magazine ‘New Scientist’ has compiled the 13 mysteries that, today, continue to cause headaches for the international scientific community. 1. The placebo effect. Take a fictitious case, the patient X. Several times a day for several days, causes pain, which is controlled by doses of morphine. Until the last day of the experiment.
Those 24 hours, without knowing Mr. X, morphine was replaced by an absolutely harmless saline solution. It seems incredible, but this solution has the same effect as morphine and pain disappears. This is what is as the placebo effect. Before the arrival of the drugs in the twentieth century, was the most potent weapon against the disease medicine. Droppings crocodile oil, worm, lizard blood and to be touched by the King were drugs used between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Since the publication in 1955 of The Powerful Placebo HK Beecher, it was recognized that 35% of patients with a wide variety of diseases could be treated only with placebo. In later studies, we have seen that can operate at 70% and even 100% of cases. No one knows yet what mechanisms are involved in the placebo effect. Some studies suggest that pain reduces anxiety and facilitates the release of endorphins (natural chemicals similar to narcotics) in the brain, though still unconfirmed hypothesis.