The following article by Dr. Joseph Mercola was transcribed verbatim from:
The New Magic that Can Heal You and Has the Drug Companies Running Scared
Posted by Dr. Mercola | April 24 2010
There is a new “product” on the market that is absolutely free to you and is giving drug companies a run for their money. It’s called the placebo effect … and it often works better than top pharmaceutical drugs.As Wired Magazine reported:
“From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo.
Despite historic levels of industry investment in R&D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007—the fewest since 1983—and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.”
They continue:
“Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them.
It's not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It's as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
The fact that an increasing number of medications are unable to beat sugar pills has thrown the industry into crisis.”
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Dr. Mercola's Comments: |
Is it really possible to feel better simply by taking a sugar pill or receiving fake acupuncture, shamsurgery or another non active treatment? If you believe it is, then absolutely, yes.
The placebo effect has been demonstrated in countless studies published in prestigious medical journals, and much to the drug companies’ chagrin, placebos often work better than expensive and side-effect ridden drugs and surgeries.
How can this be?
How Does the Placebo Effect Work?
The science of epigenetics is now beginning to explain scenarios like placebo effect and spontaneous healing, which lacked a scientific basis until now.
Epigenetics literally means "above the genes." And what is above the genes?
Your mind!
One of the scientists on the forefront of mind-body biology is Bruce Lipton. Thanks to Dr. Lipton and other leading voices, the power of your mind is finally gaining the attention it deserves.
Your mind has the power to create or cure disease because your thoughts affect the expression of your genes. Today’s "New Biology" is overlapping with consciousness science and quantum physics, and it’s showing us that we have masterful control over our own lives, including how we feel pain, depression, anxiety and even our ability to overcome diseases like cancer.
Many illnesses, from Parkinson’s disease to irritable bowel syndrome, have been proven to improve after placebo pills and treatments. The jury is still out on whether the practice of taking a sugar pill or simply going through the ritual of treatment is what’s causing the beneficial responses … but either way studies show that if you think you’re receiving a treatment, and you expect that treatment to work, it often does.
As the above article in Scientific American shared:
“In recent decades reports have confirmed the efficacy of various sham treatments in nearly all areas of medicine. Placebos have helped alleviate pain, depression, anxiety, Parkinson’s disease, inflammatory disorders and even cancer.
Placebo effects can arise not only from a conscious belief in a drug but also from subconscious associations between recovery and the experience of being treated—from the pinch of a shot to a doctor’s white coat. Such subliminal conditioning can control bodily processes of which we are unaware, such as immune responses and the release of hormones.”
The Placebo Effect Has Been Working for Decades
That the placebo effect works to relieve symptoms and disease is not new … although it is only recently – due to increasing failed trials among drug companies – that public health agencies are being forced to face this elephant in the room.
But it was nearly 50 years ago, in 1955, that anesthetist Henry Beecher’s paper “The Powerful Placebo” was published in The Journal of the American Medical Association. This was the first to bring up the very real fact that simply taking a pill or receiving treatment (even if it was “fake”) could prompt healing changes.
As Wired Magazine reported, it was after this paper was published that the Food, Drug and Cosmetic Act was amended to require drug trials to use placebo control groups. The “double-blind, placebo-controlled, randomized clinical trial,” which is still used as the gold standard today, was a result of Henry Beecher’s work.
“Today, to win FDA approval, a new medication must beat placebo in at least two authenticated trials,” Wired Magazine reports.
The Antidepressant Scam
Unfortunately, there are many drugs and treatments on the market today that work no better than placebo, yet expose patients to serious side effects. Among the most problematic and blatant are antidepressants. As written in Wired:
“The blockbuster success of mood drugs in the '80s and '90s emboldened Big Pharma to promote remedies for a growing panoply of disorders that are intimately related to higher brain function. By attempting to dominate the central nervous system, Big Pharma gambled its future on treating ailments that have turned out to be particularly susceptible to the placebo effect.”
Every year, 230 million prescriptions for antidepressants are filled, making them one of the most prescribed drugs in the United States. The psychiatric industry itself is a $500 billion industry -- not bad for an enterprise that offers little in the way of cures.
Antidepressant drugs have been proven to be no more effective than sugar pills. Some studies have even found that sugar pills may produce better results than antidepressants!
Personally, I believe the reason for this astounding finding is that both pills work via the placebo effect, but the sugar pills produce far fewer detrimental side effects.
Every time a new study about the efficacy of antidepressants hits the journals, we see antidepressants plunge further into the abyss.
One study that is hot off the press in the January 2010 issue of JAMA concludes that there is little evidence that SSRIs (a popular group of antidepressants that includes Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft and others) have any benefit to people with mild to moderate depression, and that they work no better than a placebo.
That means that SSRIs are 33 percent effective, just like a sugar pill.
Similarly, in 2008, a meta-analysis published in PLoS Medicine concluded that the difference between antidepressants and placebo pills is very small -- and that both are ineffective for most depressed patients. Only the most severely depressed showed any response to antidepressants at all, and that response was quite minimal.
The article states:
“Given these results, the researchers conclude that there is little reason to prescribe new-generation antidepressant medications to any but the most severely depressed patients unless alternative treatments have been ineffective.”
Again, these are not new revelations.
Back in 2002, a meta-analysis of published clinical trials indicated that 75 percent of the response to antidepressants could be duplicated by placebo.
Many antidepressants may actually make your “mental illness” worse, because when your body doesn’t feel good, your mood crashes along with it.
Knee Surgery: Another Classic Placebo Effect
Outside of antidepressants, one of the most glaring examples of the power of the placebo effect was published in the classic New England Journal of Medicine knee surgery study.
This was, without question, one of the most amazing studies I have ever seen published, as it definitely proves the power of your mind in healing.
It was published in one of the most well-respected medical journals on the planet and was a double-blind, placebo-controlled, multicenter trial performed at some of the top U.S. hospitals.
What did the results show? That most knee surgery results in a $3-billion hoax in the United States. It is not actually the surgery itself that is responsible for the improvement, but rather is the placebo effect. More precisely, it's the ability of your brain to produce healing.
Research by Ted J. Kaptchuk, a Harvard medical professor, supports this theory, and goes a step further saying that the more extensive a treatment, the greater the placebo effect may be.
“… The bigger and more complicated the ritual, the greater the placebo effect. Surgery and medical devices often produce a bigger placebo effect than a pill because expectations for a cure are higher,” he told Forbes.
How to Use the Placebo Effect in Your Own Life
Folks, the placebo effect is REAL.
And when I say that, I mean that if you believe you will benefit from something, you will. And the more you focus your intention on this, the more you’ll find that you can manifest nearly any result you desire.
But there is one caveat: you must resolve any emotional blocks that are standing in your way first.
For example, this could be disbelief that the pain or illness will go away, resentment that you have the pain, or even an unconscious desire to keep the pain or disease because of the extra attention you gain from it.
As Dr. Bruce Lipton said in my interview with him:
“A lot of people use the energy psychology just like a drug. ‘Oh, you’ve got a pain here. If I do this, you can get rid of the pain.’ But here’s the problem. A symptom is not generally the problem. A symptom is a reflection of a problem.”
So the pain or symptoms are not what you should focus on relieving. Instead, you must get to the root of the problem, which started in your mind. If you simply relieve your pain without addressing the related emotional conflict, your body will manifest another ache, pain or illness to tell you that there’s a problem with your system.
This is a new way of thinking about healing for most people. But if you look at it in terms of energy -- pain is energy, and your mind is also energy -- you can see how one directly influences the other.
Emotional Freedom Technique/Meridian Tapping Technique (EFT/MTT) is an extremely powerful tool that you can use to get to the root of your emotional conflicts, and to release them.
EFT is a form of psychological acupressure, based on the same energy meridians used in traditional acupuncture to treat physical and emotional ailments for over 5,000 years, but without the invasiveness of needles. Instead, simple tapping with the fingertips is used to input kinetic energy onto specific meridians on your head and chest while you think about your specific problem -- whether it is a traumatic event, an addiction, pain, etc. -- and voice positive affirmations.
I highly suggest that you explore this healing modality for yourself, and if you have an especially traumatic, complex or deep-seated emotional challenge to overcome that you find an EFT therapist to guide you.
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Replies
My grandmother was quite a hypochondriac and she took dozens and dozens of pills. It was not until she was old and admitted into the nursing home that my mother found out that my grandmothers doctors had "cured" her of most of her imaginary ailments by prescribing sugar pills. He mother's doctor shared that information with my Mom when she asked why in the nursing home, Gram's meds were far less, down to one actually... As long as her doctor gave my grandmother a pill for her woes, she would consider that the pills had cured her of what ailed her, which nine times out of ten was all in her mind maybe something she read or heard about and then was SURE she had it....(as they say a little information can be a bad thing, lol). When she was placed in the nursing home at the age of 98 due to a broken hip and arthritus, she was amazingly healthy never the less, so it seems to me that the sugar pills were just what she needed to THINK she was healthy and therefore she WAS healthy! To her, all her sugar pills made her all better though or at least it convinced her whatever ailed her was under control so she stopped fretting about it. The only real medicine she was on was blood pressure meds which worked very well. She told me one time that she had pills for her "ailing hibiscus" and that one really cracked me up. Guess her doctor told her it must be her hibiscus that was acting up as a joke and she believed it and wanted a cure for it! Her doctor meant well, he had been treating her for 60 years successfully so my mother was not mad when she found out about the sugar pills. Mom had always wondered why my Grammy got her pills from the Doctor and he always included them in the office visit. He said he would have felt guilty if he had charged for them. How nice.
I, too, am wary about the "psychosomatic illness" label, because I believe there is a lot that modern medicine does not understand and cannot explain. But at the same time it is an accurate label, because the body and mind are so intimately connected, another fact that modern medicine is struggling to integrate, with its emphasis on the physical.