Conspirituality - Bonus Sample: The Ritual of Healing
Aired: 2022-02-07
Duration: 06:18


=== Placebo Power (06:14) ===

[00:00:04]  Hello Conspirituality Podcast listeners.
[00:00:07]  Welcome to a sample of a Patreon bonus episode.
[00:00:10]  We release these every week for our subscribers.
[00:00:13]  They're usually solo essays from our team.
[00:00:16]  It costs $5 a month for access, and the support helps to keep us ad-free and editorially independent.
[00:00:24]  You can sign up at patreon.com backslash conspirituality.
[00:00:29]  Thank you.
[00:00:32]  It's pretty obvious that clinical trials are always a risk.
[00:00:36]  Volunteers gamble with unproven medications and often for little reward.
[00:00:41]  Yet participation in clinical trials is critical for pushing medicine forward, and results sometimes reveal more than you might expect.
[00:00:50]  Consider a study from 2006 in which two treatments for severe arm pain were tested—acupuncture and painkillers.
[00:01:00]  Within two weeks of the trial beginning, almost one-third of the 270 patients complained of severe side effects.
[00:01:08]  They were sluggish, the pills made it impossible for them to get out of bed, and those blasted acupuncture needles caused swelling and redness.
[00:01:19]  The interesting thing was every volunteer was forewarned about these potential side effects.
[00:01:24]  In fact, they were the exact side effects the administrators said were possible.
[00:01:30]  Discovering whether acupuncture offers more pain relief than pills was going to be a challenge given these circumstances.
[00:01:37]  But that actually wasn't the point of this study.
[00:01:40]  A Harvard University professor of medicine, Ted Kapchick, might have been trained in herbalism and acupuncture, but he had a different goal in mind.
[00:01:49]  So for this, he used sham needles so no one's skin was ever actually punctured.
[00:01:57]  And the painkillers?
[00:01:58]  100% cornscarch.
[00:02:01]  There was no control group.
[00:02:03]  Everyone received a placebo.
[00:02:06]  And yet, dozens of volunteers still suffered from side effects.
[00:02:11]  Placebo research reveals that thinking medicine is in the bottle stimulates neurochemical activity.
[00:02:17]  This is before you even put anything in your mouth or into your arm or wherever those needles were going.
[00:02:23]  Placebo interventions have been shown to reduce depression, arthritis, irritable bowel syndrome, anxiety, and fatigue.
[00:02:32]  Placebos can also increase heart rate and blood pressure.
[00:02:35]  And sham pills have been shown to reduce symptoms of Parkinson's disease.
[00:02:41]  And pain.
[00:02:42]  Kapchick's ingenious study documented cornstarch as a source of pain.
[00:02:47]  Well, the volunteers thought there was a pharmaceutical involved, which created the pain they experienced.
[00:02:54]  So, looked at through this lens, it was their own thoughts that hurt them.
[00:02:59]  Other research reports the opposite effect.
[00:03:02]  Placebo as pain relief, not as causing pain.
[00:03:05]  So a study in 2002 split 180 patients into two groups.
[00:03:10]  One cohort underwent knee surgery, the other sham surgery.
[00:03:15]  And surprise, the fake procedure was as effective for pain relief as the actual surgery.
[00:03:22]  Incredibly, roughly 650,000 people undergo a $5,000 knee surgery every year in the United States.
[00:03:33]  But what if a number of these patients don't actually need that surgery?
[00:03:38]  Can we abandon scalpels for less intrusive interventions?
[00:03:42]  And what do all these studies say about the nature of our thoughts and healing in general?
[00:03:48]  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.
[00:03:59]  These patients' thoughts generated enough soothing chemicals to make pharmacological intervention unnecessary.
[00:04:06]  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.
[00:04:22]  Placebo interventions produce chemical responses in the same brain pathways as marijuana and opium.
[00:04:29]  This placebo network is a real phenomenon.
[00:04:32]  A 1978 study showed that placebos are blocked by administering naloxone, which is a medication that stops the release of endorphins.
[00:04:42]  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.
[00:04:56]  This crossover in pain is due to the fact that our brains love to conserve energy.
[00:05:01]  We share a mechanism for both memory and prediction in the same neural pathways, so seeing the past and seeing the future.
[00:05:09]  So if our brain can work a network into multiple uses, it will.
[00:05:15]  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.
[00:05:27]  So from a holistic perspective, pain is pain, and placebos appear to alleviate all types of it.
[00:05:35]  The placebo effect is so prevalent that a 2010 study of 80 patients suffering from irritable bowel syndrome revealed stunning results.
[00:05:45]  One group was offered no treatment at all, and the other received inert drugs.
[00:05:50]  But here's the catch.
[00:05:52]  Every member of the group that received those inner drugs was told that the pills were a placebo.
[00:06:00]  I mean, the bottles were even marked placebo pills.
[00:06:04]  And even with all of that warning, the placebo group found as much relief from IBS symptoms as in trials with actual pharmaceuticals.
[00:06:14]  So placebos prove that the human body is already a pharmacy of sorts.