New Delhi, May 7: This may seem strange and quite funny to you but yes knowing your doctor may help reduce the pain you feel of an injection needle, says a new study.
Elizabeth Losin, assistant professor at the University of Miami in the US said, "When someone believes that something is going to help relieve their pain, their brain naturally releases pain- relieving chemicals."
Losin said, ''Our hypothesis, based on what we are seeing, is that trusting and feeling similar to the doctor who is performing the painful procedure is creating that same kind of placebo pain relief."
For the study, participants were asked to fill a questionnaire which asked questions about their political ideology, religious and gender role beliefs and practices.
Two groups were then made out of them. They were then told they belonged to a group on the basis of the answers they had given in the questionnaires.
Researchers told that the motto behind dividing in groups was that the people from the same group think that they had something in common with their group members, which might then make it clear itself as more positive feelings, like trust, towards participants who played the role of doctor or the patient from the same group.
The participants who played patients were assigned a doctor from their same group as well as the other group, both of their own gender.
During stimulated clinical interaction, doctors performed a pain-inducing procedure on patients. The doctors applied heat to the patients" inner forearm, in order to simulate a painful medical procedure like a shot.
After the clinical interaction, the doctors and patients were asked as to how similar they felt to each other and how much trust they had on each other.
According to researchers" findings, the more the patients trusted their doctor and felt similar to them, the less pain they reported feeling from the heat on their arm.
Well, the study also suggested that the participants who suffered from higher levels of anxiety on day-to-day basis felt greater decrease in pain from feeling close to their doctor.
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