Auto-SummaryPlacebos and belief have significant effects on both emotional and physical states, as demonstrated by numerous controlled scientific experiments. The power of placebos can be seen in various treatments, such as cancer, pain, and colds, where patients often experience improvements due to their belief in the treatment's efficacy. Placebos can also have negative effects, as shown by stories of shamans and witch doctors causing illness or death through curses. The placebo effect is a powerful demonstration of the strength of suggestion and can be observed in various research situations, even when not intended. Belief and suggestion play crucial roles in the effectiveness of placebos, and they can impact various aspects of human health and well-being.
belief effects emotional states dramatically
Belief effects physical states dramatically
the idea that mental states or belief cannot effect real physical and physiological conditions (FAR beyond stress or tension) is undeniably disproven by numerous controlled scientific experiments.
"Group A: 95 out of 100 people who get a certain type of cancer and bitch and moan about it die within two years of diagnosis.
Group B: 95 out of 100 people who get a certain type of cancer AND do daily positive health affirmations and visualizations die within two years of diagnosis."
what exactly is the value of hypothetical statistics? there is none. any arrgument can be supported by fabricated situations (hypothetical if you please) but actual studies and statistics like those cited in the following articles are somewhat more convincing.
Read up
1, "Placebos are putatively inactive substances tested in controlled studies for comparison with presumed active drugs or prescribed for relief of symptoms or to meet a patient's demands.
A placebo may be any therapeutic maneuver, including surgical and psychologic techniques, or medication in any form (eg, oral, parenteral, topical; this discussion is limited to drugs. The term placebo harks back to the 116th Psalm in the Hebrew Bible. Through a number of translation errors, the Vulgate (Latin) version came to contain the word "placebo" (I shall please). Over the centuries, the term was applied to the Vespers for the Dead, derisively to servile flatterers and toadies, and to laments sung at funerals by professional mourners In 1785, the word placebo first appeared in a medical dictionary as "a commonplace method or medicine." Two editions later, the placebo had become a "make-believe medicine. Allegedly inert and harmless. We now know that placebos may have profound effects, both good and bad.
The Binary Nature of Placebo Effects: The medical literature is replete with reports on the power of the placebo to help patients with anxiety, tension, melancholia, schizophrenia, pain of all sorts, headaches, cough, insomnia, seasickness, chronic bronchitis, the common cold, arthritis, peptic ulcer, hypertension, nausea, senile dementia, etc. But the placebo is not only able to help, it has also been associated with side effects including nausea headache, dizziness, sleepiness, insomnia, fatigue, depression, numbness, hallucinations, itching, vomiting, tremor, tachycardia, diarrhea, pallor, rashes, hives, ataxia, and edema, to name a few. This remarkable list of subjective and objective changes, both desirable and unwanted becomes more understandable and is put into perspective once one recognizes that the main component of the placebo effect is the anticipation (usually optimistic) of results because of the expectations associated with medication One can call this "suggestibility", "faith," or "hope,"
and:
A recent paper (Roberts et al. 1993) concluded that "under conditions of heightened expectations, the power of nonspecific effects (placebos) far exceeds that commonly reported in the literature."
The paper, "The Power of Nonspecific Effects in Healing," is fascinating. The authors analyzed data for treatments that met the following criteria:
(a) strong positive reports by at least two groups of investigators;
(b) at least one well-controlled negative report;
(c) the treatment had been abandoned as ineffective; and
(d) data from a major portion of the positive studies were presented in a manner that permitted reliable classification into categories of excellent, good, or poor outcomes.
The treatments that were studied included: glomectomy (the surgical removal of a small, normal mass of tissue called the carotid body that is found on the carotid artery) for the treatment of asthma; levamisole (an immunomodulatory drug) for the treatment of Herpes Simplex Virus (HSV); organic solvents (ethyl ether and chloroform), also for HSV; and gastric freezing for duodenal ulcers. In all the cases the doctors and the patients expected the treatments to work. The results for all the positive studies combined showed an excellent or good outcome in 69.8 percent of the almost seven thousand cases studied. These results led to the conclusion that a treatment outcome "is always due to some interactive combination of specific and nonspecific effects."
Research also illustrates how difficult it is to separate valid treatments from apparently valid ones. In other words, we're never without some level of nonspecific effects.
A number of other myths are associated with placebos. Try to answer the following questions:
Does a positive response to a placebo mean the patient's problem is imaginary?
Does a patient have to believe in the therapy for a placebo effect to occur?
Are placebos harmless?
The answer to all three questions is no. Placebo responses can occur in patients with real disorders; the subjective symptoms can resolve while the objective ones remain. Belief in the treatment only appears to explain a portion of the placebo effect (Jarvis 1990). It appears that belief, operant conditioning, and suggestibility all play important roles. In an interesting experiment, a man experienced pain and exhibited marked depression of a specific part of his heartbeat while being monitored by an electrocardiogram (ECG) machine during a treadmill diagnostic test. This occurred at a treadmill setting of 44. For a second test, when the treadmill number was miscounted so that the patient exercised less, he exhibited the same pain and ECG depression as at the setting of 44 (Jarvis 1990). This dramatically demonstrates the power of suggestion .
placebo 1. A substance with no medicinal properties which causes a patient to improve because of his belief in its efficacy. 2. (Experimental) A substance administered to a control group in an experiment in which the experimental group receives a drug in order to eliminate the effect of the act of administering the drug.
Wolman, Dictionary
of Behavioral Science
Could a little bit of sugar keep you from catching colds, cure a skin disease, or even make a cancer disappear? Make you drunk? All of these (and much, much more) have been reported as "placebo" effects in the scientific literature. In fact, there is hardly any human characteristic or problem that has not been shown to be affected by placebos in one research or other.
A placebo, as used in research, is an inactive substance or procedure used as a control in an experiment. A placebo effect occurs when the placebo, which cannot on its own merit have any affect,
does in fact have the same or similar affect as the experimental substance or procedure.
For example, consider the body of research that has been conducted on human response times as affected by alcohol. Subjects are given measured doses of alcohol at certain time intervals and their responses are tested following each "drink." But to make sure nothing else is causing any of the changes that may occur, it is necessary to have a "control" group. This is a group of subjects for whom everything is identical except one thing: in this case, they get no alcohol. They are treated the same way and they are given a beverage which they believe to be alcohol under the same conditions and with the same schedule.
In other words you take a group of subjects and do the same thing for all of them, except half of the group (unbeknown to anyone except the researchers) get a non-alcoholic beverage.
As you might expect, those subjects who receive alcohol begin, at some point, to show a change in their responses. And of course given enough of the alcoholic beverage many of them get plastered.
What you might find surprising, though, if you are not familiar with this research, is that some of the placebo-drinking subjects; those receiving shots of a liquid prepared to taste and kick like alcohol, but which in fact is basically just water acted tipsy and sometimes even drunk. These subjects for whom the suggestion of drinking alcohol produced inebriated-like behavior were exhibiting a placebo effect.
Placebo effects are of particular interest to us here because they are another phenomenon that illustrates the strength of suggestion. These placebo effects frequently demonstrate a potency of suggestion which we normally think of as residing only in drugs.
The placebo effect has been reported in just about every research situation in which placebos were used, and in many circumstances where the use of placebos was not intended but the effect was the same anyway.
As in situations where saline solution (simple salt water) injections stop the pain in patients who believe they are receiving a potent pain killer. Simple salt and water have no analgesic or anesthetic qualities, yet the subjects' minds responded and controlled the pain just as if they had received a narcotic or other potent pain killer.
Or subjects who catch fewer colds because they believe they are receiving huge doses of vitamin C, when in fact they are getting only small amounts of powdered sugar. When the research ends and they no longer receive the placebo, the number of colds caught has been shown to go back up.
For some people warts may prove resistant to every conventional treatment, but then promptly go away when the patients are told to apply "this new and amazingly potent drug" which is nothing more than hand cream. (Indeed, skin conditions of all sorts have proved to be extremely responsive to suggestions.)
References
Barrett, S. 1977. Health frauds and quackery. FDA Consumer 11:12-17.
Beecher, H. K. 1955. The powerful placebo. JADA 159:1602-1606.
Bourne, H. 1991. Unrecognized therapeutic measures, including placebo. In Clinical Pharmacology, ed. by K. L. Melmon and H. F. Morrelli. New York: Macmillan.
Jarvis, W. T. 1990. Dubious dentistry: A dental continuing education course. Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, Calif.
Roberts, A. H., D. G. Kewman, L. Mercier, and M. Hovell. 1993. The power of nonspecific effects in healing: Implications for psychosocial and biological treatments. Clinical Psychology Review 13:375-391.
"under conditions of heightened expectations, the power of nonspecific effects (placebos) far exceeds that commonly reported in the literature."
this is a simple and tested explanation for the efficacy of numerous forms of faith healing. Even the ancient shamans utilized this. By building a situation of total faith in the healer or shaman, then performing a convincing ritual of some kind, the healer causes the supplicant to heal himself with his own faith.
a placebo can also have a negative effect. Hence the stories of shamans and witch doctors who can cause people to become sick or die with a curse. Just as healing placebos administerd by a trusted doctor or shaman can heal, a curse laid by a highly feared witch could actually make you very sick.
As mentioned above, people can become addicted to sugar pills.
its all in the mind people
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Everything I post is fiction.
Edited by Moonshoe (12/01/04 02:20 PM)
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