Positive thoughts increase the effect of migraine tablets

New research suggests that patients' expectations can make a big difference in how they feel after the treatment of migraine, Fox News reports.

Boston researchers recruited 66 migraine patients in an attempt to quantify how much of their pain relief came from a medication and how much was due to what's called the placebo effect, the healing power of positive belief.

Here's how it worked. First, the patients who suffer regular migraines agreed to forgo pain relievers for several hours during one attack, recording their symptoms for comparison with later headaches.

Then for each of their next six migraines, the patients were given a different pill inside an envelope with a different message. Sometimes they were told it was an effective migraine drug named rizatriptan, a positive message. Other times they were told it was a placebo, a dummy pill, suggesting no benefit. Still other times they were told the pill could be either one, a neutral message.

Sometimes the doctor's message was true - they were told they got rizatriptan and they really did. Sometimes it was false because researchers had secretly switched the pills.

Of course the real migraine drug worked far better than the dummy pill. But remarkably, people who knew they were taking a placebo still reported less pain than when they'd left their migraine untreated, the researchers found.

"The more we gave a positive message to the patient, the bigger the placebo effect was," said Harvard professor Ted Kaptchuk, who led the new study with a team at Boston's Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital.

He said that effect probably isn't purely psychological, saying the ritual of taking a medication may trigger some subconscious memory that could leave people feeling better even if they knew they'd taken a fake drug.

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