Practice question · Multiple choice
A patient given an inert pill reports genuine pain relief, and brain imaging shows real endogenous opioid release. Which claim does the placebo effect support?
Hints
- The imaging is the point. Something measurable happened in the brain, and the only input was an expectation.
- Ask which direction the arrow runs: from belief to biology, or from biology to belief?
Show the answer
B. A psychological state can produce a biological change, the domains genuinely interact
Why
Expectation reached down and released real opioids, belief is not sitting alongside the biology, it is acting on it. The trap is option 2: relieved pain was never imaginary, and a mechanism you can photograph is a poor candidate for 'not real'.
Practise The Biopsychosocial Model
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