Despite the binary conversations around vaccinations, healing has never been an either/or dependent on one factor. What works for one person isn't necessarily the correct course of action for someone else. One criticism of modern health care certainly stands out: the ritual of healing has been sacrificed for the convenience of scripts and hasty dialogues between doctors and patients. Derek looks at the intersection of healing and ritual through the lens of placebo studies and psychedelics, arguing that regardless of the discipline, "therapy" is a holistic endeavor.
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It's pretty obvious that clinical trials are always a risk.
Volunteers gamble with unproven medications and often for little reward.
Yet participation in clinical trials is critical for pushing medicine forward, and results sometimes reveal more than you might expect.
Consider a study from 2006 in which two treatments for severe arm pain were tested—acupuncture and painkillers.
Within two weeks of the trial beginning, almost one-third of the 270 patients complained of severe side effects.
They were sluggish, the pills made it impossible for them to get out of bed, and those blasted acupuncture needles caused swelling and redness.
The interesting thing was every volunteer was forewarned about these potential side effects.
In fact, they were the exact side effects the administrators said were possible.
Discovering whether acupuncture offers more pain relief than pills was going to be a challenge given these circumstances.
But that actually wasn't the point of this study.
A Harvard University professor of medicine, Ted Kapchick, might have been trained in herbalism and acupuncture, but he had a different goal in mind.
So for this, he used sham needles so no one's skin was ever actually punctured.
And the painkillers?
100% cornscarch.
There was no control group.
Everyone received a placebo.
And yet, dozens of volunteers still suffered from side effects.
Placebo research reveals that thinking medicine is in the bottle stimulates neurochemical activity.
This is before you even put anything in your mouth or into your arm or wherever those needles were going.
Placebo interventions have been shown to reduce depression, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, and fatigue.
Placebos can also increase heart rate and blood pressure.
And sham pills have been shown to reduce symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
And pain.
Kapchick's ingenious study documented cornstarch as a source of pain.
Well, the volunteers thought there was a pharmaceutical involved, which created the pain they experienced.
So, looked at through this lens, it was their own thoughts that hurt them.
Other research reports the opposite effect.
Placebo as pain relief, not as causing pain.
So a study in 2002 split 180 patients into two groups.
One cohort underwent knee surgery, the other sham surgery.
And surprise, the fake procedure was as effective for pain relief as the actual surgery.
Incredibly, roughly 650,000 people undergo a $5,000 knee surgery every year in the United States.
But what if a number of these patients don't actually need that surgery?
Can we abandon scalpels for less intrusive interventions?
And what do all these studies say about the nature of our thoughts and healing in general?
The PET scans of patients that received a placebo pain treatment show that their brains produce endogenous opioids, so that's natural pain relief without the potential for addiction.
These patients' thoughts generated enough soothing chemicals to make pharmacological intervention unnecessary.
While pain relief from placebo treatments only lasts for days or weeks, researchers are studying whether a repeated course of sugar pills could help patients create enough neuroplastic change to render pharmaceuticals unnecessary.
Placebo interventions produce chemical responses in the same brain pathways as marijuana and opium.
This placebo network is a real phenomenon.
A 1978 study showed that placebos are blocked by administering naloxone, which is a medication that stops the release of endorphins.
While researchers debate whether the brain's "pain matrix" is specific to pain or attention-grabbing stimulation, It appears the region responsible for physical pain also modulates emotional pain.
This crossover in pain is due to the fact that our brains love to conserve energy.
We share a mechanism for both memory and prediction in the same neural pathways, so seeing the past and seeing the future.
So if our brain can work a network into multiple uses, it will.
So thinking our way out of the pain of a stubbed toe is not actually wildly different than out thinking anxiety, or the perceived pain of something that could happen to us.
So from a holistic perspective, pain is pain, and placebos appear to alleviate all types of it.
The placebo effect is so prevalent that a 2010 study of 80 patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome revealed stunning results.
One group was offered no treatment at all, and the other received inert drugs.
But here's the catch.
Every member of the group that received those inner drugs was told that the pills were a placebo.
I mean, the bottles were even marked placebo pills.
And even with all of that warning, the placebo group found as much relief from IBS symptoms as in trials with actual pharmaceuticals.
So placebos prove that the human body is already a pharmacy of sorts.
