UNLEASHING YOUR HEALTH POTENTIALS

If “the placebo effect” is the result of something that has no medicinal value, no healing factor, and yet it facilitates healing, then how in the world does this work? And more importantly, how can we use it to unleash more of our health potentials?

The facts are even more strange in that almost anything can work as a placebo! Over the years, placebos have been substances, procedures, rituals, words, anchors, white coats, stethoscopes about the neck, reassuring words or touches, vitamins, organic supplements, and a great many other things. That so many things can operate as a placebo eliciting the placebo effect in people thereby mobilizing people’s beliefs in a way that somehow activates the healing powers of their autonomic and immune systems is nothing other than incredible. No wonder it is such a mystery to the medical community.

And there’s more. Placebos work on a pretty wide variety of illnesses, including arthritis, asthma, bleeding, and obesity. In this, they have a measurable physiological effect on the body and indicate what leading thinkers have been saying for decades about the mind-body connection.

About the effectiveness of placebos, Thompson (2005) writes: “In clinical trials of chronic pain conditions, the placebo responses is 20 to 70 percent with a mean of about 45 percent.”

Placebo effectiveness ranges from 30 to 50 percent in depression (Brown 1992), 58% for insomnia, 54 to 56% for pain relief. (Brown, W.A., Johnson, M.F., Chen, M.G. 1992 “Clinical Features of Depressed Patients who do and do not Improve with Placebo.” Psychiatry Research, 41:203-214.)

Regarding the range of effects, placebos work on a wide range of things: pain, swelling, stomach ulcers, depression, anxiety, asthma, menopause, etc. What placebos have not been shown effective with are bacterial and viral infections, most forms of chronic degenerative diseases (Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease) and various forms of cancer (Dylan, 2004, pp. 63-64). The evidence that a placebo effect can lower blood pressure is mixed. If a placebo is substituted for an antihypertensive drug, the blood pressure remains lower than if the drug were simply stopped. (A.L. Suchman, and R. Ader, “Classic Conditioning and Placebo Effects in Crossover Studies,” Clinical Pharmacology and Therapeutics 52 (1992): 372-77)

In the field of NLP, McDermott, O’Connor, and Dilts writing about NLP applications on health have commented the following about placebos: “The placebo is a blank prescription on which we write our beliefs and expectations, a blank cheque for health. . . . The placebo effect translates our beliefs about our treatment directly and sometimes surprisingly into material reality. It shows our natural healing powers at work. It directly contradicts the ideas that illness is only in the body.” (McDermott and O’Connor , p. 72).

“Another belief is called response expectancy. Response expectancy is what you expect to happen to you, either positively or negatively, as a result of the actions you take in a particular situation. The placebo effect illustrates an example of response expectancy.” (Dilts, 1990, p. 14)

Nocebos If the effect of placebos can actually activate your mind-body system so that it facilitates well- being and healing, it can also do the opposite. It can work in a dangerous way to undermine your health and well-being. In this placebos can “go over to the dark side.” And when they do, a negative placebo is known as a nocebo.

Nocebos are also based on beliefs and expectations, but a different kind of belief and expectation, one that fearfully anticipates pain. Mass fear, rage, and sickness often occur when one or more persons become afraid of getting ill and seem to become nauseous. That’s when the fear spreads so that more and more people faint, vomit, or show other symptoms of illness.

Walter Cannon described the notion of voodoo death as “the fatal power of the imagination working through unmitigated terror.” He believed that voodoo death resulted from an over- reaction of the sympathetic-adrenal system to fear. (“Voodoo Death,” American Anthropologist 44 (1942): 169-81.)

Where nocebos most frequently occur are in doctor-patient communications and especially in medical diagnosis. For this reason, physicians ought to watch the language they use in diagnoses carefully—very carefully. The language of a diagnosis demonstrates the power of words and how words can operate as if a magical incantation. And when a doctor is not careful, but makes deterministic statements, a diagnosis can become a curse.

“If you have a medical condition, do not let the diagnosis become an identity. ... ‘I am a diabetic.’” (McDermott and O’Connor, p. 112)

Now one of the central factors of nocebos, a factor that makes them especially dangerous, is that they are more likely to be “heard” and “communicated” when a person is in a negative emotional state or mood. Mood can negatively influence health outcomes. Studies have shown that depressed people are 1.6 times more likely to have non-fatal ischemic heart disease. Cynicism, suspicion, and a pessimistic expectation that disease will occur can generate negative expectations and create a nocebo.

Now given that the placebo effect and the nocebo effect involve certain frames of mind (meta- states and layers of meta-states), not only do our states affect our health and well-being, but so do our meta-states. In fact, our meta-states do so to a much greater extent that do our primary states. This is good news and bad news. The bad news is that when we turn our negative thoughts-and- emotions (as mind-emotion energies) against ourselves, we not only create “dragon states” we also create nocebo effects that undermine our health. So what is the good news? If we can do that, we can also reverse it. And we can set more empowering and health-giving meta-states that will enhance our life energies. And, I’ll write about that next time.