Placebo power works

Your mind is a powerful tool.

If you set your mind to do something, you’re likely to get it done. If you set it to cure you when you’re sick, your chances of feeling better are multiplied.

This is where placebos come into play. A placebo is a substance or treatment with no therapeutic value but the patient is told it has. It can be inert tablets, inert injections, and even sham surgery.

A placebo cannot cure you but it can make you feel better. It can’t reset a broken bone, but it can make you believe it takes the pain away.

There’s a report of a World War II surgeon who ran out of morphine and substituted a pre-surgery injection of a saline solution. It worked because his patients believed they were being injected with an anesthetic.

This placebo effect is effective in up to half of the cases in which it is applied, but depends on several factors.

The more bells and whistles involved, the more effective the response, according to a recent Annual Review of Clinical Psychology report. According to the report, placebo pills and injections were effective in about one-quarter of the cases in which they were applied compared with a 50% response rate to placebo surgery.

The condition being treated also is a factor. Placebos work best for treating pain, itch- ing and fatigue and are not as effective for symptoms such as fever, high blood pressure and abnormal heart rate.

Mental health disorders such anxiety, depression and panic attacks respond well to placebos. While they can reduce the pain from a tumor, they can’t stop it from growing.

Medical research indicates more patients are experiencing relief from placebos, even when they know they’re being given placebos. A 1996 clinical-trial group reported a 27% difference between the effectiveness of placebo and active drugs. The difference reported in a 2013 test was less than 10%.

Despite this seeming effectiveness of placebos, doctors cannot prescribe them without telling their patients what they are. Studies show when patients are told they are getting a placebo and also told what placebos work, they get a positive placebo response. A solution is what’s called open-label placebos, which have been used to successfully treat migraine headaches, knee pain, cancerrelated fatigue, and irritable bowel syndrome, among other ailments.

The placebo power is in our minds — we don’t need to be hoodwinked into using it, we just have to start believing in it.

Modern medicine has come to believe in what Hippocrates knew: “The natural healing force within each of us is the greatest force for getting well.”

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