Your Body Believes Every Word You Say: The Language of the Bodymind Connection, Revised and Expanded Edition by Barbara Levine

Author:Barbara Levine
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The Placebo Effect

Many patients respond to expectations when given pills with no intrinsic healing power, especially if they believe the pills will help them. This placebo effect is an example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Studies of the placebo effect demonstrate the power of belief and faith in the healing process. Since people often are unaware of their true beliefs, many heal whether they think they believe in the treatment or not.

"The placebo effect in medicine is well-documented. The word is Latin from the Catholic prayer for the dead, meaning `I shall please.' In centuries past, doctors used placebos to placate problem patients. `You gave them something to send them away happy,' said Anne Harrington, a medical historian at Harvard University. Experts estimate that 30 percent of all patients getting placebo treatment today improve."104

The classic, oft-recounted case demonstrating the power of expectation in healing involved a male, advanced cancer patient. Krebiozen, a now-discredited drug then receiving widespread acclaim, was being tested at the clinic where the man was a patient. After begging for the treatment, he was given one injection by his physician Dr. West. Shortly after receiving the drug, the patient's cancerous growths "melted like snowballs" apparently freeing him from the disease. Treatment was continued with the drug three times a week till the patient was discharged. Shortly thereafter, news spread that the drug was worthless. After hearing the news and losing hope, this patient's tumors promptly recurred.

Dr. West, recognizing the powerful effect of his patient's belief system, gave him new hope when he told him that he would give him a specially prepared, more active form of the drug. For this treatment, administered with much fanfare, Dr. West in fact used a fresh water placebo. The tumors again melted away, more dramatically than before. The water injections were continued since they worked such wonders, and the patient remained symptom-free for a time. Several months later definitive studies were published showing beyond a doubt that Krebiozen was worthless. Upon learning of this, the man's tumors reappeared, and he soon died.105

Ronald Glasser, M.D., in The Body Is The Hero, reports on a paper published in the early thirties in the Journal of The American Medical Association by a physician who had evaluated thirty-five different published studies on the use of drugs in the treatment of high blood pressure. The author found to his surprise that every paper he'd looked at boasted either complete or significant partial relief from the material being tested. These papers variously claimed that mistletoe, diathermy, watermelon extract, even drops of dilute hydrochloric acid three times a day brought improvement in over 85 percent of the patients.

"Since all the substances tested were so radically different chemically one from the other, the author was forced to conclude that the only thing all the studies had in common was that `the patients wanted to improve, they wanted their doctors to be successful, they wanted the drugs to work, they wanted to get better.' He attributed the successes in the studies to the well-known but little-discussed placebo effect.

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