phobia is a type of anxiety disorder, usually defined as a persistent fear of an object or situation in which the sufferer commits to great lengths in avoiding, typically disproportional to the actual danger posed, often being recognized as irrational. In the event the phobia cannot be avoided entirely, the sufferer will endure the situation or object with marked distress and significant interference in social or occupational activities.

Symptoms involve an irrational, persistent fear of a specific object or situation that's out of proportion to the actual risk. This includes a fear of situations (such as airplanes or enclosed spaces); nature (such as thunderstorms or heights); animals or insects (such as dogs or spiders); blood, injection or injury (such as knives or medical procedures); or other phobias (such as loud noises or clowns). There are many other types of specific phobias. It's not unusual to experience phobias about more than one object or situation.

It’s only natural to want to avoid the thing or situation you fear. But when it comes to conquering phobias, facing your fears is the key. While avoidance may make you feel better in the short-term, it prevents you from learning that your phobia may not be as frightening or overwhelming as you think. You never get the chance to learn how to cope with your fears and experience control over the situation. As a result, the phobia becomes increasingly scarier and more daunting in your mind.

Exposure: Gradually and repeatedly facing your fears

The most effective way to overcome a phobia is by gradually and repeatedly exposing yourself to what you fear in a safe and controlled way. During this exposure process, you’ll learn to ride out the anxiety and fear until it inevitably passes.

Climbing up the “fear ladder”

If you’ve tried exposure in the past and it didn’t work, you may have started with something too scary or overwhelming. It’s important to begin with a situation that you can handle, and work your way up from there, building your confidence and coping skills as you move up the “fear ladder.”

A superstition is a widely held but irrational belief in supernatural influences, especially as leading to good or bad luck, or a practice based on such a belief. Technically, superstitions are an evolutionary defense mechanism. They helped us survive in the early days of humankind. We heard rustling in the grass or trees and learned that it sometimes meant a lion or a bear was coming for us, so we would scram when we heard rustling just to be safe. That makes sense. But in modern times, a lot of defense mechanisms actually aren’t necessary, but not everyone stops to re-assess the things they do and determine if they should keep doing them. It got the intended result once, so it works every time, right?

They are “irrational” when they get to the point that your adherence to them is negatively affecting your ability to lead a normal life, similar to how OCDs can range from minor to extreme. Compulsively washing your hands every time you go to the washroom is healthy, but compulsively washing your hands every 30 seconds for no reason is not. However, WebMD says:

While some of the symptoms of OCD can mimic superstitious behaviour (and the two aren’t mutually exclusive), most of the evidence would indicate there is no connection between the two.

When Psychologist Mary asked a group “do you think there are any healthy, or not overly unhealthysuperstitions?”, that led someone to ask “well, does anyone here want to admit to having superstitions?”. One person brought up something that was more of an OCD issue. I was definitely more superstitious growing up since I was raised loosely catholic and I think a lot of basically “ghost stories” come with that. I was afraid of monsters under my bed and in my closet, I would avoid cracks on the sidewalk.. but eventually after taking a critical look at many of these behaviours I decided it was pointless and a waste of my time to keep doing them. My mother and sister are both afraid of spiders, significantly so. I learned that behaviour, but I have mostly gotten over it. I still don’t especially like spiders, but unless it’s a species that I know is actually dangerous (like a black widow spider), I basically just ignore it.

But it’s true, the idea that even a group of self-described skeptical, rational, freethinking people, could still have irrational thoughts and behaviours. No one is immune, which is again part of why I enjoy researching and posting things on this site, it’s a journal of my ongoing learning process. The point I emphasized is that I think it often comes down to the simple fact that we do something and we get a positive result, and so we keep doing it the same way, feeling fairly safe that we’ll get the same desired result again. Sometimes (often?) there is truly no causal link between that action and the result we got.

So we just need to regularly check in research has proven people who believe in luck and hold “good luck charms” (of any type), tend to perform better, but it is usually a result of an added false confidence, they believe they will do better because of the charm, but if they didn’t have it, they would be less confident than average. So essentially, the charm is causing a placebo effect.

Placebo-controlled studies are a way of testing a medical therapy in which, in addition to a group of subjects that receives the treatment to be evaluated, a separate control group receives a sham "placebo" treatment which is specifically designed to have no real effect. Placebos are most commonly used in blinded trials, where subjects do not know whether they are receiving real or placebo treatment. Often, there is also a further "natural history" group that does not receive any treatment at all.

The purpose of the placebo group is to account for the placebo effect, that is, effects from treatment that do not depend on the treatment itself. Such factors include knowing one is receiving a treatment, attention from health care professionals, and the expectations of a treatment's effectiveness by those running the research study. Without a placebo group to compare against, it is not possible to know whether the treatment itself had any effect.

Patients frequently show improvement even when given a sham or "fake" treatment. Such intentionally inert placebo treatments can take many forms, such as a pill containing only sugar, a surgery where nothing efficacious is actually done (just an incision and sometimes some minor touching or handling of the underlying structures), or a medical device (such as an ultrasound machine) that is not actually turned on. Also, due to the body's natural healing ability and statistical effects such as regression to the mean, many patients will get better even when given no treatment at all. Thus, the relevant question when assessing a treatment is not "does the treatment work?" but "does the treatment work better than a placebo treatment, or no treatment at all?" As one early clinical trial researcher wrote, "the first object of a therapeutic trial is to discover whether the patients who receive the treatment under investigation are cured more rapidly, more completely or more frequently, than they would have been without it." More broadly, the aim of a clinical trial is to determine what treatments, delivered in what circumstances, to which patients, in what conditions, are the most effective.

Paraphrased from: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo-controlled_study

Approximately 4 to 5 percent of the U.S. population has one or more clinically significant phobias in a given year.

Specific phobias occur in people of all ages. The average age of onset for social phobia is between 15 and 20 years of age, although it can often begin in childhood. Statistics show that only 30% of patients seek treatment.

Phobias are actually rich, varied, and complex. We know that people have had phobias for thousands of years. But it’s only been recently that we’ve known much about those fears—or even known enough to call them by the term phobias. The first written reference to phobic problems that we have is in the works of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates (470-410 B.C.E.). Hippocrates wrote about the many ailments and problems of his patients, and we can still read many of his volumes of observations today.

Placebo in history is the account of the changing understanding of the phenomena of the placebo effect and term "placebo".

The word was first used in a medicinal context in the late 18th century to describe a "commonplace method or medicine" and in 1811 it was defined as "any medicine adapted more to please than to benefit the patient". Although this definition contained a derogatory implication it did not necessarily imply that the remedy had no effect.

In conclusion, This topic can be a new way to treat people with phobia. It will help patients overcome their phobia and if proven wrong will also benefit the society.