EXPERIENCES AND THE PLACEBO EFFECT

There’s several things which are incredibly amazing about the placebo effect—first and most obvious is that a true cure can be substituted by a non-cure. Take a sugar pill which has no active ingredient in it and associate it in a sufficient way to some medicine, and 30 to 70 percent of the time, the neutral sugar pill will create the same results as the medicine. Amazing! How does that work? It works through the power of association and the power of belief—two foundational psychological processes. Create an association so that you think and you believe that the pill you’re taking is the medicine, and more often than not, it will have that effect.

The same placebo effect has been discover with “shame surgeries.” In double-blind studies, some patients were submitted to a surgery that never happened. The doctor made a slit in the skin, stitched it up so it certainly gives evidence that there was a surgery, yet in reality, nothing more was done. And sure enough, 65% of the patients experienced relief from their symptoms and recover.

The negative backside of the placebo effect is the no-placebo effect. Similarly if you think and believe that something is a curse, a hex, a forecast of doom and gloom—so it is to you. This was first reported in scientific journals with the “voodoo deaths” in Hatti. Medical researchers who went there and re-examined the bodies of those who died, did autopsies, and discovered that they could not discover the cause of death. Something else was going on. What was going on began to become clearer when they discovered that those who died were those who believed in the hex. Conversely, those who did not believe, those who were outsiders to that culture, did not.

What amazes us regarding the placebo effect is that it shouts aloud that there is a mind-body connection. That merely thinking and believing something is real is enough to have actual physical effects in the body, in one’s neurology, in one’s immune system, etc. Today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of studies being conducted on this mind-body relationship. We know that, in general, yes the mind influences the body. And we can postulate where in brain anatomy we construct certain kinds of thoughts and how those thoughts send signals to the body about how to respond.

What we still do not know or have is a dependable process that we can offer someone to gain relief and to trigger the body’s self-healing powers. Yes we have a few patterns like the Allergy Cure pattern that works about half the time. And there are hypnotic patterns that Erickson developed that can often work with patients for pain control. Yet all such patterns depend on a variety of variables—the patient’s state of mind, background experience and knowledge, relation to the healer, the healer’s knowledge and skill, the set-up for the process, and a hundred other

factors. There are just a lot of unknown variables and relationships which explains why if placebos work 30 to70 percent of the time, then they also do not work 30 to 70 percent of the time.

More recent studies have brought to light another, in my opinion, even more fascinating and amazing facet about placebos. You can know that a pill is a placebo and it can still work. Now how crazy is that? Prior to this, researchers always hid the fact that a pill might not be the real thing, but a placebo. We then considered the effective factor to be the belief that it is real. But now with studies wherein the experimenters told people, “This is a placebo pill; there’s no active ingredient in it. Take it two times a day with water and it will do X and Y.” Then an absolutely amazing thing happened—in spite of knowing what they knew, people experience a relief of symptoms. The placebo works even when they knew it was not real.

Normally we would think that knowing it is not real, a person’s mind-body system that can active self-healing would not be activated. Yet it was. One’s self-reflexive consciousness does not inevitably turn off or reject the placebo effect, but most somehow allow it, maybe even facilitate it. Knowing whatever you know is not an innocent thing—it is neuro-semantically alive and dynamic. And even knowing that you know doesn’t discredit it. Human consciousness —what a mystery!