Mindhacks

Scientists and doctors have long been puzzled by how certain patients have been able to heal themselves of life-threatening diseases.

Doctors have found that a patient can trigger self-healing by the mere belief that they will be cured. This is commonly called the placebo effect.

". . .the best-documented way in which the mind is known to affect the body."

Doctors are finding that many people manage to get cured when they are given fake medication, called placebos, which usually consist of nothing more than sugar pills or distilled water, and then told by their doctors that they were taking real medication.

There is no explanation for why the placebo effect works, except that somehow, the patient’s belief that they are getting cured triggers some sort of self-healing ability within the patient. The placebo effect is probably the best-documented way in which the mind is known to affect the body.

The placebo effect, using some of the most outrageous remedies, has worked exceptionally well with warts. In 1934, a physician conducted a double-blind study showing that placebos worked almost as well as sulpharsphenamine, the drug commonly used to treat warts at the time. 53% of patients given the actual medicine were cured. But of the patients given the fake medicine which was nothing more than distilled water and told it was a genuine wart cure, 48% were cured.

The opposite also works.

If you believe something is harmful to you, it tends to be.

One study showed that 19 out of 40 subjects developed asthmatic symptoms after inhaling a saline solution they believed to be allergenic. Twelve developed full-blown wheezing and bronchial spasms, which disappeared completely three minutes after receiving another saline solution placebo. The researchers concluded that suggestion played a significant role in precipitating asthmatic attacks.

Weirder still – the placebo effect also works with surgery.

In the summer of 1994, a surgeon named J. Bruce Moseley had 10 patients scheduled for an operation intended to relieve the arthritis pain in their knees. All 10 were wheeled into the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center, draped, examined and anesthetized. All 10 were then dispatched to the recovery room and sent home from the hospital by the next morning equipped with crutches and a painkiller. All 10 men believed they had just gone through a reliable medical surgery to cure them of their knee arthritis pain. But this was not the case.

In fact, while two of the men would undergo the standard arthroscopic surgery for their condition – the scraping and rinsing of the knee joint – and three would have the rinsing alone, five would have no recognized surgical procedure at all. Their surgery would be a placebo. Moseley would cut the placebo patients’ knees three times with a scalpel – to make it feel and look real, there had to be incisions and scars for the patient to believe he had undergone surgery – but that was it.

The placebo worked. Six months after surgery, the 10 patients still didn’t know whether they had been faked out or not. But all of them reported much less pain.

The placebo effect can be so powerful that all modern drugs have to be tested against a placebo before they are released to the public. And many former treatments and drugs have been taken off the market when their healing properties were found to be solely due to the placebo effect.