We have long known that placebos can be as effective as full potency medication in a certain percentage of people, but a recent Harvard study entitled "Placebos without Deception" has found that the placebo effect works even in patients who know that they are taking a placebo. Even though their pill bottles were clearly labelled "placebo pills" in large letters to remind them of what they were taking, 59 per cent of the IBS sufferers recruited for the study reported "adequate relief" from their condition -- a percentage almost identical to patients in another study who were taking the approved medication.
It may be significant here that the experimenters told the patients who were to receive the placebos about the efficacy of the placebo effect. In fact they co-opted the participants' minds to help with their own healing: the patients knew that placebos have been proven to work and their minds used that knowledge to make their bodies feel better.
Mind over matter: The Krebiozen story
The mind can create astonishingly strong effects, as can be seen in an incredible but true story from the annals of placebo literature involving a cancer patient called Mr. Wright and a now-discredited cancer drug called Krebiozen.
The story goes that Mr. Wright, who was dying of lymphosarcoma, begged to be included in the clinical trials for Krebiozen, which was then an experimental medication. Seeing no hope for him, his doctor gave him a dose anyway, and then went home for the weekend, fully expecting Mr. Wright to be dead by Monday. Instead, Mr. Wright staged a spectacular recovery, with his tumours "melting like snowballs on a hot stove", and returned home to resume a normal life.
About two months later news began to circulate that Krebiozen was ineffective. Upon reading this, Mr. Wright relapsed and was readmitted to hospital. His physician now told him that he had obtained a new, more effective batch of Krebiozen, and injected him with a saline solution -- this time a pure placebo. Once again Mr. Wright recovered. But when he read that Krebiozen had been effectively discredited as a cancer cure, he relapsed again, and died of his disease.
There can be no doubt that the causal agent of Mr. Wright's astonishing recovery and relapse was his own mind, pure and simple. But can we stop to ask the question how powerful that mind must have been to melt tumours the size of oranges practically overnight, and then to regrow them, simply on the basis of belief?
Mind over matter: Energy healing
A few decades ago there were only two popular forms of energy healing on the market, Reiki and Therapeutic Touch. Both were recognized as being "adjunctive" to medical care. It took a good deal of persuasive effort for Reiki and TT practitioners to be allowed to work in hospitals, but as more and more nurses began to embrace these practices, they gained greater credibility and acceptance. Several studies found that they accelerated healing and decreased pain and anxiety in surgical patients. Even so, the generally dismissive medical attitude to these modalities was that they were "woo-woo" and didn't do much good, but if they made patients believe they felt better, what was the harm? Doctors did, however, express concern that energy healers might give patients "false hope" and bilk them out of money by charging them for something that was no better than a placebo.
These days energy healing modalities are proliferating all over the map, and they are no longer limited to pain and anxiety relief: they now claim, and can show, their own share of successes. In a series of ground-breaking studies Dr. William Bengston, a sociologist, proved that energy healing could cure cancer in mice -- a significant first step in showing what was indeed possible, and a strong indication that the effects of energy healing go beyond placebo. At about the same time, in Eastern Europe, Zdenko Domancic created a method called Bioenergy Healing that has helped over a million people with various conditions. In the United States a healer called Kurt Peterson claims a 77 per cent success rate with cancer after having treated 1200 patients and is seeking to partner with hospitals to document further treatments.
The future of medicine?
I have personal experience with some of these methods and have seen what they can do. I have seen frozen shoulders effectively treated in four sessions, cancer patients' lives extended well beyond their prognoses, knee surgeries pre-empted. I sincerely believe that this is where the future of medicine lies. Current medical practices address the human being as a biochemical machine, but we are far more than that. We are also creatures of energy. Einstein's famous equation E equals MC squared in fact means that matter is frozen light -- or frozen thought. If thought and matter are different polarities on the same continuum, then it follows that thought can affect matter. We are just beginning to learn to what extent.
The beauty of these therapies is their simplicity, their non-invasiveness, their lack of side-effects, their ease of administration. There is no need for expensive machinery or for drugs costing tens of thousands of dollars. As the population ages and develops chronic conditions known for eating up health care funding without the sufferer obtaining much relief, the energy practitioner will only need his or her training and an office with a massage table or a few chairs to provide effective and relatively inexpensive care for many patients.
There will always be room for doctors to provide acute care and accurate diagnoses. But with health care costs spiralling out of control, the time is at hand for the power of the mind to be recognized, and for energy practitioners and the patient's own healing abilities to be given increased focus in treatment.
Sources
T. J. Kaptchuk, E. Friedlander, J. M. Kelley, M. N. Sanchez, E. Kokkotou, J. P. Singer, M. Kowalczykowski, F. G. Miller, I. Kirsch, A. J. Lembo (2010) "Placebos without deception: A randomized controlled trial in irritable bowel syndrome". PLoS One, 5.
Klopfer, B. (1957) "Psychological variables in human cancer". Journal of Projective Techniques, 21, 331-340.
Think About It: a movie exploring the Domancic Method of Bioenergy Healing.
Join the Conversation