The Power Of
The Plain Old Placebo

The placebo effect is a running joke in the medical arena. Many physicians assert that it proves a patient they can't cure is really a hypochondriac. "He didn't get better from my treatments so I gave him a miracle placebo and he got well."

Some people have been trained by the media to believe the placebo effect is psychological, due to a belief in the treatment or to a subjective feeling of improvement.

Doctors in one study successfully eliminated warts by painting them with a brightly colored, inert dye and promising patients the warts would be gone when the color wore off.

Patients suffering pain after wisdom-tooth extraction got just as much relief from a fake application of ultrasound as from a real one, so long as both patient and therapist thought the machine was on.

Fifty-two percent of the colitis patients treated with placebo in 11 different trials reported feeling better -- and 50 percent of the inflamed intestines actually looked better when assessed with a sigmoidoscope

("The Placebo Prescription" by Margaret Talbot, New York Times Magazine, January 9, 2000).

What is the placebo effect? "The word placebo is simply Latin for I shall please." It is well known that there are times when the physician gives the patient a fake pill (usually sugar or starch) and the patient's belief in the physician's godlike powers is so strong that there are measurable and observable improvements in the health of the patient.

Why is this important? Because just as some people get well because they think they are taking the real medicine, some people fail to get better because they think they are just taking a placebo. In testing new drugs the placebo effect must be compensated for or the proof of real benefits are tainted. This is done by giving each participant of a "control" group a placebo instead of the real medicine being tested. Unless more people in the group getting the real medicine get relief than the number of people in the "control" group that experience improvement it is - usually - judged of no value.

In double blind tests nobody involved in performing the experiment knows who is getting the real medicine and who is getting the placebo. This is kind of like putting a wolf in sheep's clothing. Irving Kirsch, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, believes that the effectiveness of Prozac and similar drugs may be attributed almost entirely to the placebo effect. He and Guy Sapirstein analyzed 19 clinical trials of antidepressants and concluded that the expectation of improvement, not adjustments in brain chemistry, accounted for 75 percent of the drugs' effectiveness (Kirsch 1998). "The critical factor," says Kirsch, "is our beliefs about what's going to happen to us. You don't have to rely on drugs to see profound transformation."

Many people are distraught when they learn the MIRACLE PILL they are taking that helped them get better is just a placebo. The media has trained them to believe this proves their problem is "all in their mind" and that there was/is nothing really wrong with them.

What it really proves is that
doctors are claiming credit for many cures
that the patients are doing for themselves.

Think about it, up to 50% get better even though they were taking placebos and up to 50% get worse because they thought they were only taking placebos. In other words, up to 100% of us can get well on our own with no medical treatment whatsoever! No wonder Native American medicine men were getting better results than Euromerican doctors right up until the 20th century; they were only doing half as much wrong.

Millions of dollars have been spent on compensating for or eliminating the placebo effect. Wouldn't it be far more beneficial to turn that thought around and learn how to use it? TELL the people that got worse in spite of taking real medicine that the placebo will do them just as much good as the $200 a shot pills they were taking and hey, they are $199 a shot better off. TELL the people that got better in spite of taking a placebo that there is no need for them to buy the $200 a shot pills they were taking and hey, they are $199 a shot better off too!

Wait a minute, wait a minute,

some people get better

and some people get worse.

We're no better off than we were.

NO! YOU'RE RIGHT!

It doesn't matter which way our reaction is. All we have to do is find out if we get better or get worse and the proof is in the pudding that we CAN BE INFLUENCED this way. Once we know that for a fact we can be influenced then we can turn to prayer, positive thinking, affirmations, meditation or concentration and get well at a cost of NEXT TO NOTHING because what this really proves is that we are Children of God and we have the power to cure ourselves of many ailments.

My landlady offered me a small air cleaner.  I plugged it in and within minutes my air was noticeably cleaner.  After an hour I felt refreshed.  After several weeks I noticed the air was getting stale.  Obviously it was time to change the filter.  Upon taking the machine apart to replace the filter I found the original filter inside, STILL INSIDE ITS PLASTIC WRAPPING.  There was no way on earth it could possibly have cleaned even one molecule of air, yet I had been given weeks of relief.  I had just proven to myself that a placebo would work for me just as well as the high-priced model.

Somehow that gives me more faith in Euromerican doctors.  Now I know that placebos work for me then I know that just about anything s/he gives me will work for at least two weeks.  By that time I could be well again, placebo -- or not.