Placebo Response and Energy Healing
What would you consider the greatest achievement of modern medicine? The “Jarvik” heart, the identification of the human genome, Viagra? If the gauge of success is the greatest impact on the health of the majority of people then sanitation, clean drinking water and vaccinations are the hands down winners having saved millions of lives. I would argue that the greatest discovery of modern medicine is the placebo. That small little sugar pill that patients take in a clinical trial when assessing the efficacy of new drugs. The placebo is designed to be inert and have no medicinal effect. Its purpose is to act as a control in an experiment designed to remove bias when interpreting the effects of a new medication. If there is no difference between the effect of the new drug and the placebo then the drug is said to be ineffective and has hence failed the study. Drugs that fail in clinical trials seldom are approved by drug regulators such as the FDA and tend not to make the companies that develop them billions of dollars.
So why do you ask is the placebo the greatest discovery of modern medicine? Each time a clinical trial is undertaken using a placebo something miraculous and so far unexplained happens. People taking the sugar pill get better. Their symptoms resolve, their pain goes away, their cholesterol and blood pressure go down, and sometimes people even get side effects from this sugar pill. Why this isn’t headline news astounds me. Pharmaceutical companies spend millions of dollars conducting clinical trials and every time the placebo is used as a control patients respond to it. You would think someone would be trying really hard to understand this phenomenom. Placebo response rates have been reported in the medical literature in the range of 17% - 50%. This is in the range of the expected effect the actual drugs are intended to have. In fact in order for a study to be considered positive in favor of the new drug it has to show a statistically significant difference from the placebo, this does not necessarily mean that the absolute difference in effect between the placebo and the medication is large or even clinically meaningful. The only trials where it is acceptable to not use a placebo are new therapies that are potentially life saving or sparing for example cancer studies or HIV studies. It is considered unethical to withhold a potentially life saving intervention from a patient even if the experimental therapy is unproven as long as the patient participating in the trial provides informed consent. This means that most cancer drugs have not been tested against a placebo and therefore we have no way of knowing absolutely how these extremely toxic drugs would perform when held to the same experimental standards that a cholesterol medication undergoes.
My point in this is not to present an argument against novel medications and treatments as there have been many breakthroughs that have saved countless lives and prevented much suffering and illness. My real interest is exploring the dynamic of what is taking place in the mind and the body of the patient who believed he or she is taking a new experimental medication but in fact is taking nothing at all. This mind body connection is fascinating and has not been fully explored by modern science. Holistic and alternative medicine practitioners have long understood that energy is the key to health and well being and imbalances of these bodily energy systems causes disease. It is well recognized in Western medicine that men with highly anxious personalities are at higher risk of heart attacks independent of other risk factors. Chinese medicine has known for thousands of years about the flow of chi or internal energy and used the understanding of the meridians or channels of chi in the body to diagnose and treat disease through acupuncture, moxibustion, and chinese herbal medicine. In the other eastern medicine traditions the idea of chakras or energy systems and their alignment have also been employed to provide optimal health and prevent and ward off disease.
What this leads to is that we get what we expect and we receive the benefits or the consequences of our perceptions of our environment. Maybe the key is the belief in the power of modern medicine. Modern medicine in all honesty cannot fully explain the all the intricacies and dynamics of the human body and there are many cases that defy reason and logic. Our Western notion of treating the sick instead of preventing illness is in part propagated by the very system that claims to offer ‘healthcare’. Maybe modern medicine with it’s cultural cache and mystique, with its scans and blood tests is not that far away from the shaman or medicine man dancing over his patient shaking his gourd and chanting. The key to both experiences and outcomes is the belief of the patient. If mainstream medicine could somehow come to terms with the human as a body and spirit as opposed to a biological machine then we might be a step closer to integrating the phenomenal discoveries of modern medicine with the evolving consciousness of humanity.
