Experimental Psychology and Healing Process of a Patient - Research Paper Example

College Introduction There are situations in medicine when people come to doctors for absolutely no illness to be treated. However, since they insist, most doctors end up administering placebo. Placebo has no effect completely on the individual’s body but a psychological treatment that is used to experiment on the behavior of the patient. In many circumstances’, the placebo is likely to function and the patient to be fully treated. However in other conditions, the placebo is not advised and the doctor has to be very careful before administering the “drug’ (Jaffrey, 2001). Of impotence to this paper is to find out how placebo is able to actually treat someone without having any chemical effect on the patient. All this can be explained right from the brain. What are the responses to placebo when administered to a person? Is it faith in a doctor relevant to the healing process of a patient? After thorough search of literature related to this topic, two articles were identified from the search engine that was relevant to the given topic. The first article was finding the correlation between self directed speech and actions that people performed. This topic was slightly different from the hypothesis however the methodology of the experiment were quite similar to the one used in this report and so it was chosen for reference. In the article, three experiments were performed on two groups of people. The two people were sent to select ten materials in a given draw and one was to memorize the materials while the other was to speak loudly as he picked the materials from the drawer. It was noticed that the person who had self directed speech had the advantage and performed better with minimized error as opposed to those who did not have the self directed speech. The person with no self directed speech had a higher chance of error and in many occasions came back with the wrong materials. To ensure that this was not dependent on ones memory ability, the roles were revised and this time round the same was noticed. As a result of this, it was concluded that there was a significant relationship between memory and self directed speech (Jaffrey, 2001). Graph 1 In the second article, the main test was to identify if there was a relationship between stress and treatment. The article was based on several studies in African infested war zones. War patients were treated and monitored after the ordeal they had one through. Most of the patients had lost their families, their homes and a lot more. Due to this, they had a lot of stress that made this point a better point of reference. Below is a graph of the result of the experiment.The second experiment was done in Europe, the patients had less stress and to top it up, had family support. The experiment results revealed that the patients with a lot of stress had a lot of time healing as compared to the patients with no stress. Methodology To finalize the report, I had to visit a nearby health facility to carry out an experiment. Before doing anything, I spoke to the management on the issue and how I wanted the issue to be researched. After some few talk about patient confidentiality, I agreed not to name any patient rather used statistical terms and algebraic terms to describe the patients. The doctor then removed a file containing a list of past cases of placebo. He had identified 100 patients who were not ill but required to be treated to come up with the list, he chose from a collection of past patients who had reported to be ill yet they were medically ok. Age was one of the factors that we considered in choosing the participants. We chose those who were in the same age group and youths in their early 20s were a better lot to choose from. He gave 60 of them placebo and sent the other 40 home without any medication telling them that they were alright. The 100 patients were monitored for a few days and the table below is a summary of how they fared. Result Table 2 Placebo administered No placebo administered The number that healed and never came back to the hospital 48 10 Number that came back to the hospital for further medication 12 30 From the table, it is evident that the patients who received placebo performed much better as compared to those who never took the placebo. This is interesting since the placebo had no medical value in them rather the patients believed that they had been treated. In the research, the doctor had 100 degree of freedoms, in all the patients that came for medication, he could either choose to provide placebo or to send them home without any medication. This means that in all the 100 experiments, he had 100 degrees of freedom. Using this degree of freedom, the hypothesis can be accepted or rejected depending on the outcome of the experiment. However before accepting or rejecting the hypothesis, it is important to use the test of independence of chi square. This will decide on whether the hypothesis can be accepted or rejected (Sitwell, 2000). Test for independence was used because there are two categorical variables. The population was also relevant to test for independence. Ho: faith in a doctor contributes to the healing process H1: faith in a doctor is not relevant to the healing process After a thorough chi square analysis of the two hypotheses, the hypothesis was accepted and the null hypothesis rejected. It was therefore concluded that peace of mind is very important in the response of a patient to medication. This is because, the placebo had no medical effect to the patients rather they had believed that they had been given medication and so they were healed. However, the other patients still had doubts in their mind and as a result, they never got well (Sitwell, 2000). Discussion Most patients just like religious faithful, heal not because of the power of the medicine given to them but because of the power of faith in the person giving out the medication. As a result of this, some patients come for medication when they absolutely do not need any medication. To tackle this, smart doctors give out placebo to the patients so as to use the faith that the patients have in them to heal. This is what usefull in this research was. The faith that the patients had on their doctors was a key factor in healing them. This was due to the psychological connection between medicine and getting well. From this, it is possible to conclude that doctors need to create a sense of faith that patients have in them to ensure that they get well quickly not because of the medication given but due to the faith of the person giving out the medication. Appendix Graph 1 the graph of the performing criteria latency against the block Table 2 is the table of the placebo results and none placebo results References Sitwell, S. (2000). Placebo. Daventry: The author. Jaffrey, K. S. (2001). The placebo. Arcadia Bay, Qld: K.S. Jaffrey. Read More