Only someone who suffers from asthma can understand the panic that comes with a sudden attack that feels as though you’re suffocating. Many such victims reach for an inhaler to dispense the drug albuterol, which provides lung relief.
Now, a new study published in the New England Journal of Medicine confirms not only the drug’s benefit, but a whole lot more — about how caring can enhance treatment.
It found that asthma patients given a placebo (inert drug, aka fake treatment) or no treatment felt better despite measurable differences in lung function improvement as compared with those receiving drug treatment.
One of the study’s authors, Ted J. Kaptchuk, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, described for WebMD the elegance of the research: “Disease is what doctors search for–the underlying physical thing they can detect with labs and imaging and can express in hard numbers,” he said. “Illness is what a patient experiences. …There is a difference between what doctors find and what patients experience.”
What the asthma study demonstrates is that making patients better requires treating illness as well as treating disease. Thirty-nine asthma patients stopped taking the drugs prescribed for their condition. Then they randomly underwent four different regimens during which lung function was tested regularly. They were:
- treatment with an albuterol inhaler;
- treatment with an inhaler with no active drug (a placebo);
- treatment with bogus acupuncture (the device appeared to puncture the skin like acupuncture needles, but didn’t); and
- no treatment.
As expected, the albuterol treatment registered improved lung function by 20%. And not unexpected was that the placebo treatments improved lung function somewhat–7%. It was interesting that patients who got no treatment also improved by 7%.
But truly surprising was how patients reported their condition. Asked how much better they felt, they said 50% better with the albuterol; 46% better after fake acupuncture and 45% better after using the inert inhaler. The latter two positive reports could be attributed to the “placebo effect,” which is often seen among study subjects who don’t know that they’re not receiving the real McCoy. But even after knowingly receiving no treatment, they said they felt 21% better.
As lead study author Michael E. Wechsler, M.D. told WebMD, “with this study we saw that part of taking care of the discomfort … is being there. …There is definitely some mind-body interaction in asthma that relates to the shortness of breath that patients feel.”
People who study the placebo effect draw a distinction between objective medical outcomes (in this study, lung function) and the subjective medical outcomes of patient-based feelings (in this study, less shortness of breath).
They hope to raise consciousness that, sometimes, medical research dismisses subjective results to overwhelmingly favor objective results. But the artful practice of medicine addresses the reason for the suffering as well as the suffering itself.
That said, it would be foolish to ignore the whole picture painted by the asthma study. Treatment with a proven drug clearly resulted in superior lung function. And without the availability of that treatment, people will experience preventable asthma attacks. The goal is for patients to receive medical treatment and medical care.