The Placebo Effect

This is Dr. Rob Bates again. The last several weeks we’ve talked about the different stresses on the body, the physical stresses, the chemical stresses, and the mental stresses, and when the body can’t adapt to such stresses, it will break down. The innate intelligence of your body can’t adapt to the environment and you start having these diseased states.

This week we’re going to talk about a very interesting subject: the placebo effect.

If you get a chance, take a look at the book “The Biology of Belief” by Bruce Lipton, Ph. D. He’s a medical scientist who has taught at med schools and does a lot of research in this area. Basically what one part of this book is talking about is the placebo effect.

Placebo effects occur when you have a study where you give a sugar pill to some people in the study without their knowledge while giving another set of people the drug they want tested and positive effects ensue. In other words, it’s just coming from their minds.

They did a study, in The New England Journal of Medicine, on arthritic knees. One group had actual knee surgery performed on them, while another group had debris flushed out of the joint that may have been causing inflammation to the knee, while the third had a mock surgery, a placebo surgery, where they made the incision and talked through an actual surgery but didn’t do anything to the knee. The three groups went through their normal rehabilitation, and what they found, interestingly enough, was that there was no change, no difference, in the outcome of all three of those groups; meaning, some of the people who actually had the placebo surgery were able to be active again. One man who had to use a cane before the study was able to go out and play basketball after the surgery!

The power of the mind!

Also, they did another study with the 6 main anti-depressants. They measured them up against the placebo, a sugar pill, and in all those cases, the placebo effect beat the anti-depressants!

Do you really need the anti-depressants or just the placebo effect?

What Dr. Bruce Lipton goes on to say is that our society is so ingrained with the notion that if you take this pill, it will help you.  There is billions of dollars worth of marketing right now from the pharmaceutical companies that will educate and ingrain into you, your kids, and your grandkids to take these drugs because it will heal you. In other words, we have a whole society that believes a drug will cure them.

He wraps up this section by saying that some of the pharmaceutical companies are trying to find out which people are more susceptible to the placebo effect, because they don’t want those people to affect their studies since it fouls up the possibility of their drugs to be pushed. So, they want to exclude the competition which is a placebo sugar pill.

Maybe what we need to do is spend all these billions of dollars researching why that placebo effect actually happens in the body, why the belief process actually happens. Then we can just pop out the miracle sugar pills instead.

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