Bottom Line Health
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| Harnessing the placebo effect may have some positive therapeutic applications, Zubieta says. "You want to enhance the placebo effect under some circumstances," he says. "And in some others, you want to reduce it—like when you do a clinical trial."
. - The Creighton University Web site pro-— vides more information about the placebo effect at http://altmed.creighton.edu/homeo pathy. Click on "Placebo Effect."
Quick Pain Relief Tricks
When you're in pain, it's hard to think of anything else. But redirecting your thoughts can be helpful. Following are some other techniques to try... |
Shannon Brownlee
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 The problem is the "placebo effect," the ability of placebos to make people feel better, a mysterious but common occurrence in medicine. In the case of depressed children and teenagers, the placebo effect is particularly strong: As many as half of kids in clinical trials get better on placebos. The other confounding factor here is the fact that not everybody responds in the same way to an SSRI. Studies in healthy volunteers, people who have no signs or symptoms of depression, have found that some people feel terrific, even better than well, on an antidepressant. Many feel little or nothing. |
Bottom Line Health
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| The Creighton University Web site pro-— vides more information about the placebo effect at http://altmed.creighton.edu/homeo pathy. Click on "Placebo Effect."
Quick Pain Relief Tricks
When you're in pain, it's hard to think of anything else. But redirecting your thoughts can be helpful. Following are some other techniques to try...
•Instruct yourself to think and behave in a functional way. / will take a walk to increase the circulation of blood in my legs, bring oxygen to my tissues and lift my mood.
•Decatastrophize. Reframe your pain as less terrible than it feels. I've been here before. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
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 The third example can be accounted for as the mind's effect on the biochemistry of the body or by the placebo effect, which involves realizing a deeply held intention or expectation. However, again we are back to asking what the mind is. If it is so powerful that it can change the state of our body and mimic the effects of pharmaceuticals, then why has medicine ignored this natural healing capability for so long, dismissing it derisively as the placebo effect, and why isn't there a Manhattan Project of health care to explore and harness it? |
Tanya Harter Pierce
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 The positive placebo effect occurs when someone heals because they think they are being given an effective treatment, and therefore they think themselves well. Countless studies have proven the positive placebo effect to be a powerful healing force. Yet, the positive placebo effect is simply the wondrous power of the mind/body connection. It is simply the physical body saying, "I shall please" as it responds to a person's genuine thoughts.
But the negative placebo effect is the exact same wondrous force. It occurs when a person thinks they are not going to recover, so they don't. |
Kevin Trudeau
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 However, medical science became confused when they observed in their own testing of drugs the placebo effect. The placebo effect, as described by medical science, is when you give a patient nothing, yet they believe they are getting a powerful drug and therefore their illness is cured. There is absolutely no explanation except that the patient's "belief" or "thoughts" actually cured the disease. This placebo effect is not questioned in the medical community; it is factual, documented, and known to be true. |
Mike Adams
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 In fact, across the board, the placebo effect works better than prescription drugs, especially when you consider that most drugs work on far fewer than 30 percent of patients.
Yet, conventional medicine dismisses the placebo effect as pseudo-scientific quackery— even as their own studies prove its consistent efficacy across literally tens of thousands of studies. No drug, surgery, or conventional medical treatment has ever been tested as extensively as the placebo effect, and this mind-body phenomenon proves itself again and again. |
David Winston, RH(AHG), and Steven Maimes
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 Some skeptics suggest that the reason herbs work is due to a placebo effect. The placebo effect describes the phenomenon of when a person's belief that something will work is able to positively influence their physiological function or healing. Researchers are divided on whether this phenomenon even exists. Some studies suggest there is little or no evidence of the mind's ability to produce significant clinical effects. Other studies have found positive evidence that this effect can occur from 30 to 60 percent of the time. |
Mike Adams
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| The mind has the power to initiate healing processes in the body, and that's why the placebo effect works. In fact, across the board, the placebo effect works better than prescription drugs, especially when you consider that most drugs work on far fewer than 30 percent of patients.
Yet, conventional medicine dismisses the placebo effect as pseudo-scientific quackery— even as their own studies prove its consistent efficacy across literally tens of thousands of studies. |
Michael Pollan
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 And then there is the placebo effect, which has always bedeviled nutrition research. About a third of Americans are what researchers call responders—people who will respond to a treatment or intervention regardless of whether they've actually received it. When testing a drug you can correct for this by using a placebo in your trial, but how do you correct for the placebo effect in the case of a dietary trial? You can't: Low-fat foods seldom taste like the real thing, and no person is ever going to confuse a meat entree for a vegetarian substitute. |
Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George
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 The outcome of this meta-analysis suggested that the clinical effects of homeopathy are likely to be attributable to the placebo effect. The Lancet study does not prove that homeopathy is never effective or that all its accomplishments are rooted in the placebo effect, but it does raise major questions about the plausibility of homeopathy as a mainstream treatment.
My friend Kim Jobst is the editor of The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, as well as a homeopath himself, and I serve on his editorial advisory board. |
Mike Adams
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| It has been found to be approximately 30 percent effective at treating everything. The placebo effect is very powerful, and yet it is merely one application of mind-body medicine. The mind has the power to initiate healing processes in the body, and that's why the placebo effect works. In fact, across the board, the placebo effect works better than prescription drugs, especially when you consider that most drugs work on far fewer than 30 percent of patients. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
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| For healing effects that are said to be mind-mediated only, the placebo effect is provided as an explanation. þ So far as consciousness goes, we have two discrete categories?awake/aware and asleep/unaware—and a third called the subconscious/unconscious, which tends to play a slight to nonexistent role in conventional medicine. Generally, the subconscious is considered to be linked to "unknowing" and consciousness to "knowing." In other words, consciousness is linked with the sen-sorium, that is, the sensory apparatus of the brain. |
Mark Sircus
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 She dismisses suggestions that the change is a placebo effect. "I was not one day without pain and now I don't have to take heavy pain medication," she reports.
We know that a lack of magnesium underlies our epidemic of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes and osteoporosis. Minus magnesium, hearts beat irregularly; arteries stiffen, constrict and clog; blood pressure rises; blood tends to clot; muscles spasm; insulin grows weaker and blood sugar jumps; bones lose strength; and pain signals intensify. |
J. Douglas Bremner
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 It was all a placebo effect. You could give a woman HRT, and she would have a 25% improvement in her sex life. But you could give a woman a sugar pill, and it would have the same effect—plus it wouldn't give her a heart attack.
There has been a lot of interest in whether memory and cognition are affected by HRT. Both men and women experience the decline in memory that normally occurs with aging. Estrogen affects brain areas involved in memory like the hippocampus, which has led to the idea that the decline in estrogen after menopause is associated with a decline in memory function. |
| A review from fifteen years ago showed that fluoxetine was only modestly more effective than placebo, with more than 80% of the improvement accounted for by a placebo effect.2 A more recent metaanalysis from data submitted to the FDA showed that 80% of the improvement with antidepressants comes from the placebo response. |
| It is possible, however, that because patients on omega-3 treatment could detect the "fishy" smell of their supplements while those on placebo would not get the fish smell (a problem that cuts across many studies of herbs and supplements), there was a placebo effect. Although interesting, this study is an isolated one, and little else has been done to look at the relationship between omega-3 fatty acids and mood. |
Bottom Line Health
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| This finding is the first direct evidence that endorphins play a role in the well-known placebo effect.
THE STUDY
Lead author Dr. Jon-Kar Zubieta, an associate professor of psychiatry and radiology at the University of Michigan Medical School, and his team induced pain by injecting a concentrated saltwater solution into the jaws of 14 healthy young male volunteers. The injections were given while the men underwent positron emission tomography (PET) scans of their brains.
During one scan, the men were told they would receive pain medication, but were given a placebo instead. |
Ron Garner
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 That our minds can heal our bodies is now becoming a proven reality in studies on the placebo effect. There have been television documentaries on how people have been healed completely when they truly believed that a reparative surgery had been performed, or that a certain medication had been administered, even though the surgery wasn't performed and the medication was just a sugar pill.
It inevitably disturbs the pharmaceutical manufacturers that in most of their clinical trials, the placebos, the "fake" drugs, prove to be just as effective as the engineered chemical cocktails. |
Andreas Moritz
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 As shown by this study, digitalis's only value was to trigger a placebo effect, just as the dummy drug did. In other words, any benefits of the drug besides being a trigger for the placebo response are non-existent.
During medical training, every would-be doctor has to face the unpleasant fact that drugs themselves cannot induce a healing response. A drug may work in only 35 percent of the people who receive it. The rest of them may have either no results or become worse because of the drug's side effects. |
Mark Blumenthal
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 Response rates of vitamin B6 and EPO were no better than placebo effect. 67% of women taking danazol had complete response.
Substantial improvement in PMS symptoms for EPO and placebo suggesting a strong placebo effect. No significant differences in scoring of 10 PMS symptoms or menstrual symptoms between EPO and placebo. Authors conclude the improvement experienced by women with moderate PMS was solely placebo effect.
DB, PC n=36 women with severe PMS
3 months
One, 500 mg capsule
>g EPO providing 45 mg GLA)
Statistically significant difference (p<0. |
Mike Adams
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| In fact, the placebo effect may be one of the most powerful healing tools in our arsenal, and yet modern doctors foolishly toss it out as useless.
In truth, the placebo effect may become an important tool in the future of medicine, once we finally get past the Dark Ages of modern medicine in which we live today and make room for the emergence of new, advanced ideas in healing. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
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| Science was studying the placebo effect, which showed clearly that the mind influences the body. Stress, emotions, and other psychological states were recognized as affecting, and in some cases even causing, disease. Lifestyle choices became almost as important a factor in health as genetics or exposure to pathogens or toxins. Attitude, such as the will to live or an optimistic outlook, was identified as an important predictor of who would have a good outcome from a therapy and who might not. We are still in the midst of Era II medicine, of what might be called mind-body medicine. |
Anne Harrington
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 The main argument offered by this new literature was that the placebo effect was important above all for what it taught us about self-healing. It was not just a trick; it produced real (physiologically discernible) effects, and therefore it need not inherently undermine patient trust in doctors or function as a source of patient disempowerment. On the contrary, rightly understood, it could be a source of patient empowerment and a means of enriching the doctor-patient relationship.69
The popular media were fascinated. |
Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey
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| If it is so powerful that it can change the state of our body and mimic the effects of pharmaceuticals, then why has medicine ignored this natural healing capability for so long, dismissing it derisively as the placebo effect, and why isn't there a Manhattan Project of health care to explore and harness it?
At heart, each of these cases highlights how things as immaterial as mind and thoughts or fields of information play a role in health. The fact that these seemingly miraculous stories are real—and there are hundreds of other such stories in the world's medical literature? |
Anne Harrington
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| However, this new laboratory work on the placebo effect did not immediately change the focus and tone of discussions about the power of positive thinking. The reasons for this are not hard to understand. In the 1970s, positive thinking was part of the new, patient-empowering holistic medicine. Placebos, whether handed out in a clinic to pacify annoying patients or used in trials to test new drugs, were identified by critics with the most patronizing and ethically fraught face of mainstream medicine. |
| The placebo effect, previously vilified as a product of mere suggestion, was made over into the prime medical mover of positive thinking's power and declared the new faith cure of our time.
Chapter four, "Broken by Modern Life," takes up the narrative of lament of mind-body medicine. This narrative tells us that we suffer from disease because we live in a modern world that challenges our energies beyond their capacities. |
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