How Can You Defeat Cancer with a Fake Medicine? 7 Facts About Placebo

The Power of the Mind: It's now scientifically proven. A patient who believes the medical treatment they receive will help - will recover, even if the treatment is merely a dummy. The patient's expectations and beliefs, both positive and negative, have a significant impact on the disease's progression. Here are 7 facts about placebo.

1. Placebo refers to any medical action that does not include the active ingredient. The placebo can be surgery, the appearance of a syringe, the words a doctor says to the patient, or the significance of the illness to the patient. The relief experienced by the patient is not just a product of their imagination but is caused by real changes in the brain that can be observed with modern technologies.

According to Dr. Mosley, a surgeon who participated in placebo surgeries and research about them, everything surrounding the medical treatment can trigger the patient's healing powers. The sight of the doctor in a bright white coat, the medical instruments they use, the ritual of the medical examination, the words used by the doctor, all these form a framework for the patient connected to the expectation of recovery or imminent symptom relief.

2. The term placebo means "to please". Due to its association with deception and fraud, the placebo effect has always elicited a sense of discomfort.

3. Previously, placebos were mainly used in the pharmaceutical industry to test whether a particular medication was indeed effective. A drug that did not perform better than a placebo on test subjects was not approved for use.

4. Intriguing stories about the placebo effect have continued to emerge in medical literature and have trailed modern medicine like a ghost. One of the most famous was published in 1957 in the medical journal Projective Techniques under the title "Psychological Variables in Cancer". It demonstrates the substantial impact that patient expectations and beliefs, both positive and negative, have on the course of the disease.

For example, a man named Mr. Wright was suffering from terminal lymphatic cancer. He had tumors the size of oranges in his chest, abdomen, and lungs, and it seemed his days were numbered. One day, he read about a new medicine, Krebiozen, under development specifically for the kind of cancer he had. He asked his doctor, Dr. Philip West, to try the new drug. The doctor refused because the drug hadn't been clinically approved yet. The patient kept pleading and when the doctor thought the patient wouldn't live past the weekend, he agreed to give him the drug. When the doctor returned to the ward at the start of the next week, he was amazed to find the patient walking around the ward, chatting cheerfully with the medical staff. "His tumors shrank like snowballs in the sun," the doctor said. A week later, Mr. Wright was discharged from the hospital with his body clear of tumors.

5. One of the prominent researchers today studying the placebo effect is neurologist Professor Fabrizio Benedetti from the School of Medicine at the University of Turin, Italy. Fabrizio agrees with the claim that the placebo uses the framework surrounding medical treatment to trigger the body's healing powers. Fabrizio also provides research evidence that the placebo can, like actual medication, activate or inhibit neural connections in the brain, alter hormone secretion, or the level of activity in the brain.

6. According to Professor Avinoam Reches, a neurologist at Hadassah Hospital, the placebo effect is much stronger in diseases where the psychosomatic component is significant. In conditions like ulcers, irritable bowel syndrome, migraines, anxiety, and depression, the placebo has a much more substantial effect than in malignant diseases or degenerative diseases of the nervous system.

7. There is widespread agreement among all researchers that no special personality traits have been found in individuals affected by the placebo effect. "This conclusion, which may sound somewhat negative, also has a positive side. It also means that the effect of a placebo treatment largely depends on circumstances and the environment, and that essentially all of us have the potential to respond well to this type of treatment," says Dr. Brody of the University of Texas.