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What are placebo effects? They’re harmless “medicines” or procedures that are used to test a therapy’s effectiveness. But if you thought placebos had no real impact, you’d be mistaken.
“The mind is powerful, and you have more control than you think.” -SCOTT D. LEWIS, mindfulness practitioner
Many people have heard about patients in Stage 3 or Stage 4 cancer—and suddenly they shift into spontaneous remission and the cancer is gone. One woman named Ginny was given nine weeks to live due to cancer detection. More than forty years later, she is alive and well. Some people believe that these seeming miracles are the result of prayer; others think a change of diet made all the difference. But here are two things we know for sure:
- Traditional medical science can’t explain what happened.
- The mind contains the power to heal the body.”
Placebo Discovery and Real Cases
There are countless examples of placebos duplicating or even surpassing the impact of the real actual drugs. By mobilizing the brain’s frontal lobe, placebos can have tremendous power over pain, over medicines’ side effects even over degenerative disease. Here is a quick walk through the history of this amazing phenomenon to show you just how powerful your mind really is:
- The placebo effect was discovered during World War II by an anesthesiologist named Dr. Henry Beecher, who’d run out of morphine in the middle of a German bombardment. Desperate to ease a soldier’s pain, Beecher’s nurse injected a syringe of saltwater but told the wounded man he was getting the powerful painkiller. To Beecher’s astonishment, the saline soothed the soldier’s agony and kept him from going into shock. After Beecher returned to Harvard Medical School after the war, he pioneered the use of “controlled” clinical studies for new medicines, where some of the test subjects would unknowingly get a placebo. By subtracting the improvement in the placebo control group, researchers could determine whether a drug really worked or not.
- In a migraine pain study at Harvard Medical School, the placebo was found to be nearly as effective as the actual drug. What made the results even more astounding was that the scientists clearly labelled it “PLACEBO”—the patients knew what they weren’t getting! As the lead researcher noted, “The placebo effect is more than positive thinking.… It’s about creating a stronger connection between the brain and body and how they work together.”
- Not all placebos are equal. The bigger the “intervention,” the more profound the result. Higher placebo “doses”—bigger pills—boosted the effect. The placebo effect can be strengthened or weakened by the outward qualities of the placebo: Taking more placebo pills generally has a greater effect; capsules do a better job than pills, and injections do better than capsules.
- In a Harvard study, one hundred medical students were enlisted to test two drugs: a “super stimulant” red pill and a “super tranquilizer” blue one. Without the knowledge to the students, the drugs were purposely switched—the red was actually a barbiturate, and the blue an amphetamine. Even so, the subjects who were given a “downer” experienced stimulation because of their expectations, while those who took the “upper” that was actually a barbiturate felt tired. Talk about the power of the mind! The subjects’ expectations actually overpowered the drug and reversed its impact to the very opposite of what the chemicals normally create.
- And this one will amaze you: A trial at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center enrolled 180 subjects with significant pain from osteoarthritis. Two-thirds underwent arthroscopic knee surgery; the other 60 had a fake “placebo surgery” procedure. Both groups had the same prep and were cared for overnight by nurses who didn’t know who’d had the real operation. The results? The placebo patients reported just as much pain relief—and functional improvement—as the ones who’d had the real surgery. One year later, the placebo group was doing better at walking and stair-climbing than the surgical patients. The results were so profound that the Department of Veterans Affairs told its doctors to stop performing these operations.
Your Attitude Matters in Placebo
You don’t have to pop a sugar pill to get this effect. Simply changing your outlook can add years to your life! According to an Ohio study, middle-aged subjects with positive attitudes on aging wound up living more than seven years longer on average than those with negative attitudes. And research out of Yale found that older people with a positive focus on aging were 44 percent more likely to fully recover from a disabling health problem.
In a seminal study on the mind-body connection, Ellen Langer, Ph.D., a professor of psychology at Harvard, took a group of older men on an isolated New England retreat—but with a twist. The hotel was retrofitted with every visible cue—magazines, TV shows, movies—from twenty years earlier. The subjects were told to act as if they’d actually traveled back in time. When they discussed “current” events from two decades earlier, they spoke in the present tense. At the end of the five-day “counter-clockwise” experiment, the men showed measurable improvement in memory, hearing, vision, grip strength, joint flexibility, and posture. Their arthritis eased up. Based on before-and-after photos, they even looked younger.
It turns out cultural stereotypes about aging, good or bad, become self-concepts—and self-fulfilling prophecies. Positive attitudes protect against dementia, even in people with the high-risk ApoE4 gene. What’s the common thread of these studies? A positive mindset can reverse the aging process! Remember that saying, You’re only as young as you feel? The science tells us it’s true!
Want one more piece of evidence? In a more recent study by Professor Langer, a group of hotel room cleaners was told that their everyday work met the surgeon general’s requirements for an active lifestyle. A control group wasn’t given this information. Four weeks later, the first group had lowered their systolic blood pressure, their body mass index, and their percentage of body fat. The control group showed none of these improvements. As Professor Langer wrote, “it is clear that health is significantly affected by mindset.”
Covid-19 & Fear
Now that you know that your mind can simulate surgery or drugs, or make you feel a generation younger, the next step is to control it—something very few people do. And here’s the problem: An undirected mind tends to go to fear. We saw this tragically during COVID-19. According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), the number-two mortality risk factor for people with COVID, just behind obesity, was “anxiety and fear-related disorders.” Fear was more deadly for COVID patients than severe diabetes, chronic kidney disease, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, or heart disease. It sounds crazy, doesn’t it? But the CDC science shows it to be true.
As we’ve noted, we have a two-million-year-old “fight-or-flight” brain that evolved to protect us from saber-toothed tigers. The tigers are long gone, but our brain still overblows every “crisis.” It worries what people are thinking about us, or that we don’t have enough money. It turns bumps in the road into matters of life and death. But we don’t have to play along. We can kill this fear monster before it grows up and destroys our life, family, and community.
Real Story of Norman Cousins
We’ve seen that our minds can make us healthy, but they can also make us sick as well. And not only that, they can also create a contagious effect of fear. One of the earliest heroes in the science of neuroimmunology, the study of how the nervous system and immune system interact, was UCLA professor and bestselling author Norman Cousins. He was diagnosed with a rare, autoimmune form of inflammatory arthritis called ankylosing spondylitis. In its advanced stages, the condition can lead to the total fusion of the spine—it’s incredibly debilitating and painful.
Instead of sitting at home to suffer, Cousins decided to cure himself by laughter. Determined not to let the diagnosis limit his positivity in life, he found that just ten minutes of deep belly laughter would give him two to three hours of relief from his agony. In place of pills, he would watch funny movies as often as necessary for pain reduction and a good sleep. Many years later, doctors found that his arthritis had been stopped in its tracks, with no progression. Baffled by the results, they decided that Cousins must have been misdiagnosed and the condition had resolved on its own. Cousins, however, knew that there was something else at work.
This is one of the best-known cases in the science of psychoneuroimmunology, the study of how what we think (psycho) changes the brain (neuro) and in turn affects our immune system. Cousins’s life and work were so significant that the University of California at Los Angeles now houses the Norman Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology.
‘Mass Induced Hypnosis’
During a football game in Los Angeles, a few people came down ill with symptoms of food poisoning. The doctor who treated them ascertained that they’d all had Coca-Cola from one of the two dispensing machines by the stands. He naturally wondered if the soda’s syrup had been contaminated or the machines’ copper piping had corroded. But before they could pinpoint the cause, he didn’t want anyone else to be exposed. So he went on the public address system and described the symptoms of the sick people and warned everyone not to drink any more Coca-Cola.
Within minutes, the whole football stadium became a place of vomiting people—including many who hadn’t gone to either soda machine. There were five ambulances shuttling back and forth to bring people to a nearby hospital. Later that day, they found out there was nothing poisonous in the Coca-Cola machines. As soon as they got the news, the people in the hospital stopped throwing up. There was nothing wrong with them. Cousins called it “a mass-induced hypnosis,” an acute physical reaction caused completely by people’s minds.
There’s no question that fear can cause shortness of breath, our temperature to rise, and even make us vomit. So whether you’re dealing with COVID, the flu, or going into the hospital for some procedure, mindset is critical. Since we live in a world today where fear is the cultural standard, and we’re supposed to avoid risk at all costs, most people let fear take over their lives. But here’s the reality: Life is risky. It’s so risky, in fact, that none of us are going to get out of it alive! So it’s critical that we learn to direct and control our own minds. Once you master your mind, you’ll make yourself not only healthier but happier as well. You will transform the absolute quality of your life. (Excerpt is from ‘Life Force’ by Peter Diamandis and Tony Robbins.)
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