PLACEBO

I’m all for placebos. The fact that many people with mild to moderate depression respond to them is a good sign. To me the placebo effect is the meat of medicine: the patients heal themselves. That is the response you want to elicit. Instead of always trying to rule out placebo effects, we should be trying to encourage them. They are pure healing from within. Getting the maximum placebo response with the minimum intervention is the art of medicine, which is distinct from the science. But doctors are uncomfortable talking about placebos, because they think they involve deception. The word comes up most often in the question “How do you know that’s not just a placebo effect?” The key word here is just.

            There is an assignment I have given to many medical students and doctors in our trainings. Pick up any publication of a randomized controlled trial of a drug and turn to the table summarizing the results. In the control (i.e., placebo) group you’ll always find a few subjects who showed all of the results produced in the experimental group, which received the drug being tested. To me this is the single most important finding of sixty years of randomized controlled drug testing. It means that any effect you can produce in the human organism through a pharmacological intervention can also be produced, at least some of the time, purely by the mind. That is phenomenal. We should be investigating that mind mechanism with all our ability so that we can take greater advantage of it to treat disease and stimulate healing. Let the brain centers and neurochemical pathways that control immune function and other physiological functions do the work.

-- Dr. Andrew Weil, interviewed in The Sun