How to Trigger the Placebo Effect
by Lolette Kuby
 Wake
up to the amount of pessimism and cynicism that characterize your thinking.
Most of us have learned not to put our trust into very many things. We feel
like gullible fools when we trust. We have been duped so often by the
government, the media, the justice system, the Church, and the people in our
lives, that what we fear most is more duping. And we have heard enough stories
and seen enough proof of the dreadful failures of biomedicine to be left with
little faith in doctors and their treatments. We know in our bones that we have
been misled by the claims of modern medicine, but having little knowledge and
less faith in any "reasonable" alternative, and having been taught
from the time our milk teeth came in that without doctors we will die, we keep
going back to them. The irrationality of our reasonableness doesn't occur to us:
We tend to be like a man I know who was exasperated to the point of fury when a
friend who practiced Christian Science died of cancer. Yet the same man accepted
as an unavoidable tragedy the death of his own wife by cancer after she had
exhausted all conventional cancer treatments.
If you don't trust doctors, though, you must trust something -- or your
chance of getting well is slim, indeed. Lack of trust coupled with low élan
vital is perilous. Karl Menninger found in "a good many men and women
suffering from cancer, an indifference to life, a detachment from life." No
treatment can make you well if you are secretly tired of life. So, first, be
mindful of your pessimism -- bitterness, disappointment, displeasure may occupy
your mind more than you know.
- Wake up to the nocebos that assail you on every side.
A nocebo can be anything, just as a placebo can be anything, depending
entirely upon your reaction to it. But the most dangerous nocebos are those
that are institutionalized. Outside of religious or quasi-religious
organizations, our society has no institutionalized placebos -- but it is
loaded with institutionalized nocebos. I have already discussed them at
various places in this book, but -- whether you are well or sick -- it is so
important to be vigilant that I will list some nocebos again.
If you want to shift to a healing state of consciousness, avoid the
following:
- Support groups that encourage members to continually rehash their
problems and to share graphic descriptions of their disease and its effects
upon their body. These groups also reinforce the person's
self-identification as a diseased person.
- Creative visualization exercises that involve visualizing the enemy (in
whatever form the enemy takes), even if victory over the enemy is also
visualized.
- Advertisements and commercials that sell their product by scaring
people into thinking that they already are or are very likely to be sick.
Don't read them. Don't watch them.
- Religions that imply that sickness is a punishment for wrongdoing and/or
a way to expiate sin.
- Religions that imply that sickness is a good thing -- sent by God as a
test of worthiness and strength of character.
- Movies, television programs, and books that describe illnesses,
accidents, and medical procedures in precise detail and that make sickness,
accidents, and disease glamorous and heroic.
- Doctors who practice "life-cycle medicine" -- the theory
taught to most medical students that health is defined by the age of the
patient and that physical deterioration correlates with aging and should be
expected. Life-cycle medicine regards ill health as normal and perceives the
patient as analogous to a machine whose various parts wear out after a
certain amount of use -- what is healthy at 60 includes conditions that at
30 would have initiated extreme medical interventions. That a person can
remain robust and healthy into very old age is a concept foreign to
life-cycle medicine.
- Wake up to your nocebo thoughts. They're easy to recognize. They keep you
up at night.
With the exception of excited anticipation of some wonderful event, what goes
on in your mind when you are trying to sleep is a nocebo thought. Your mind may
repetitively analyze a present circumstance, or continually recapitulate a past
grievance, or keep imagining some future catastrophe. These sleep-preventing
mental states stoke the adrenaline and cause additional harm that medicine has
just begun to understand. You do not toss and turn thinking happy thoughts.
You can begin to rid your life of unhappy thoughts by becoming aware when you
have them. Unhappy thoughts enter our minds as automatically as we turn the
blinker on when we turn a corner. As with any habit, it takes practice and
determination to change -- a conscious, forcible yanking of the mind to a
brighter place. One of the most healthful states you can achieve is to become
sick and tired of being sick and tired. Then you will discover that it doesn't
take long-term psychotherapy to dislodge the world of unhappiness that inhabits
your mind. You can dispose of it in the same way you dispose of trash, by taking
it to the curb on collection day -- you just do it.
I can virtually hear some readers' roar of objection: "You are
recommending denial and repression. You are telling us to put a Band-Aid on a
wound that will be come gangrenous if it isn't cleaned out!" Well, yes and
no. It is essential to be awake to what we are feeling and thinking.
Psychiatrist Mark Epstein says, "When we refuse to acknowledge ... unwanted
feelings, we are as bound to them as when we give ourselves over to them."
On the other hand, we know the truth of "use it or lose it." That
truth applies equally in reverse: If you want to lose it, do not use it. If you
exercise an idea or an emotion, you will not lose its effects on your life.
Continually rehashing childhood traumas, adolescent rejections, and adult
failures keeps them alive and kicking.
3. When Karl Menninger expected the recovery rate to be low among people with
weak élan vital, he was not referring to full-blown clinical depression; he was
referring to normal people who drag through their days feeling overburdened,
unimportant, and unaccomplished. Such people may not particularly wish to be
well, because well or sick, they are the same old person in the same old life --
the life that attracted sickness in the first place. Conventional psychotherapy
might actually interfere with healing when it concentrates on familiar problems
and their causes.
For just this reason, Lawrence LeShan has given up practicing conventional
psychotherapy. I quote him at length: "A final reason I became increasingly
uncomfortable with the psychoanalytic approach with patients with severe cancers
is that at the end of a year and a half or so, I could see that the
psychotherapy was having little if any effect on the development of the
cancers.... They all died, and so far as I could tell, in about the same length
of time as they would have died without the work we were doing."
Traditionally, the fundamental questions posed by psychotherapy have been,
"What are the symptoms? What is hidden that is causing them? What can we do
about it?" No matter how how well therapy uncovered and worked through
psychological problems that developed early in life, LeShan found that "the
cancers proceeded at the same pace." So he began to ask new questions:
"What was right about this person? ... What should her life be like so that
she is glad to get up in the morning and glad to go to bed at night? ... What
are the unique ways of being, relating, expressing, creating, valid for this
person? What has blocked her perception of them in the past? What blocks her
expression now?"
As patients became involved in answering these questions, in discovering
their individual "songs," the rate of tumor growth was in fact slowed.
After 12 years, LeShan followed up on 22 patients who had been considered
terminal and found that of those who became engaged in the process of
self-discovery -- shifting their focus from their illness to their unrealized
potential self -- a remarkable 50 percent achieved long-term remission.
Unlike conventional psychotherapy, which travels back into the past and moves
forward toward the disease as though it were the climax of their lives, LeShan's
psychotherapy begins with the present and moves away from the disease into the
future. If you use psychotherapy, seek out a variety like LeShan's.
4. Be awake to your "faith" choices and expand them. For instance,
you might acknowledge intellectually that two doctors have very similar skills,
but you would choose the one who is cheerful instead of the one who is solemn
because cheerfulness is a trait that heightens your expectation of getting well.
Another person's faith might be triggered by the solemn doctor.
5. The dominant culture won't encourage you to have faith in your own good
health. Seek out small organizations that help foster your faith in health.
These might be church groups, alternative medicine groups, or independent,
upbeat self-help groups. Flee groups that teach the separation of spirit and
body, as though there were two of you -- your soul and the "dying
animal" it is fastened to.
6. Stay away from situations and persons that are toxic to you. These are
easy to recognize: You are not at ease when you are with them, and when you
leave, you feel a lingering disquietude and displeasure with yourself. You can
know what is bad for your spirit the same way you know what is bad for your body
-- it hurts.
7. Seek out situations that make you feel good: a gathering of friends, a
walk in the woods, music, dancing -- whatever is accompanied by good feelings
while you are doing it and not followed by bad feelings when you stop.
8. Explore alternative medicine, any form you feel intuitively drawn to. I
attach a caveat to this advice: Don't become an alternative medicine junkie,
hurrying from one treatment mode to another. There are no panaceas. What you are
looking for is yourself, the ultimate source of your own healing.
9. Pray. Prayer is a type of autosuggestion. God does not have to be
persuaded. You cannot change God's mind by praying; prayer changes your mind. It
clarifies and articulates what you want, and by doing so helps you to deliver it
to yourself. Some who claim not to believe in God (or in something analogous to
God) admit they sometimes pray spontaneously or out of desperation. I would say
that these people believe with their hearts though not with their intellects.
God does not withhold anything from you and therefore cannot grant anything to
you as a reward for praying.
Prayer is a powerful placebo, but most of us pray intermittently and lapse
into habitual negative thoughts when the prayer is over. What are you thinking
now? That is your prayer. What are you thinking now? The thought that can change
you is the thought you are thinking now. When you can submit to the healing
presence in the universe, which is available to you all the time, you will
actually feel the flow of health through your body.
10. Meditate. Neurophysiologist J.P Banquet says, "New sciences like
psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the mind's ability to control the body's
immune system, are showing that meditation can be used not only to prevent
illness, but also to treat even terminal illnesses like cancer." Actually,
meditation is both a placebo trigger and a spiritual state. As a trigger it
takes you away from the malady; it "detaches" you from your illness
(and from all other concerns as well), and in that detachment or
"forgetfulness," healing occurs. As a spiritual state, it can
"provide access to an alternative reality." Meditation doesn't arouse
faith in anything, but meditation is a state of union of the self with the Self.
11. Acquire the habit of using affirmations. Though affirmations are a sign
of the desire to have faith, more than arrival at the "place" of
faith, they are a notable form of autosuggestion. In some spiritual disciplines
-- Christian Science, Unity, Science of Mind -- affirmations are sometimes
called treatments. The individual affirms that he or she already possesses what
is desired. In a sense, affirmations are prayers of gratitude. They do not
beseech. They ask for nothing. There is nothing to ask for because the
affirmation acknowledges that whatever is desired is already at hand.
Affirmations end with "and so it is."
Some people who practice affirmations mistakenly think of them as magical
chants, as though the words cause something to happen.
Affirmations make nothing happen outside yourself. They make something happen
inside yourself: They change your thoughts; your changed thoughts change your
world. An affirmation is a tool to change your mind. When your mind is changed,
the affirmation is no longer needed.
12. Use creative visualization. In the subconscious, thought often takes the
form of images. As with dreams, the subconscious "believes" that the
image is fact.
13. Allow yourself to try direct suggestion for a physical or emotional
problem you may have. The practitioner of direct suggestion uses only words. If
touch is used, it is used to soothe and comfort, as an expression of love, not
as the source of the healing.
Direct suggestion is the method used by the Emmanuel Church. Early in their
ministry in the late nineteenth century, the Emmanuels put their method to a
severe test. At that time, tuberculosis was a common disease for which the only
known treatments were a change of climate or the rest and special diet offered
by expensive sanitaria -- treatments obviously not available to the poor. The
Emmanuel Church "attempted to ascertain whether the poorest consumptive
might not be treated successfully in the slums and tenements of a great
city."
The practitioner Edward Worcester would sit at the bedside of patients and
quietly assure them that they were in a state of peace and well-being, guiding
them into profound relaxation. Often they sank into a deep sleep, which
Worcester believed was essential to healing. When they awoke it was as though
they were following posthypnotic suggestion: They would be in less pain even if
their bones were broken. Or they would feel hungry -- even if they had been
rejecting all food.
"For eighteen years," writes Worcester, "our results were as
good as those of the most favored sanitaria. Then the Commonwealth of
Massachusetts, impressed by these facts, took over our work. Its physical
equipment was, of course, far better than ours, but it could not command the
faith, the courage and obedience and the cheerfulness of mind we had managed to
instill into our patients, and it was not able to approach our results."
Direct suggestion directs the self to heal the self.
The great healers mentioned in this book -- Mesmer, Quimby, Eddy, LeShan --
all pointed to the source of power as the patient, and not themselves. LeShan
concluded that the ability to heal was not an "arcane talent" but
"a set of acquirable skills." If he could acquire these skills, he
reasoned, so could the patient himself. LeShan asserts that anyone who can enter
into two or three seconds of absolute belief in wellness has become his own
faith healer.
And Jesus, of course the most renowned faith healer of all time, said,
"What I do, can ye also do." In several places, the New Testament
states that Jesus' power was limited by the degree of faith of others: At
Nazareth, Jesus was "astonished at their lack of faith," and could do
no "work of power." Jesus' true power lay in his ability to inspire
faith.
In his important book Persuasion
and Healing, Jerome Frank uses psychotherapy as the model situation in
which the placebo effect is brought into play. All schools of psychotherapy, he
writes, include four elements that are also present in faith healing, in
shamanistic rituals, and in religious revivalism. Psychotherapy requires:
"1) the patient's confidence in the therapist's ability and desire to help,
2) a socially sanctioned place where treatment is administered, 3) a 'myth' or
basic conceptual framework to explain the patient's symptoms, and 4) an easy
task for the patient to perform and initially succeed at in order to counteract
the demoralization that most patients have experienced in life...... Frank
concludes, "One might view psychotherapy, in this regard, as a highly
organized way of bringing the placebo effect to bear......
I extend Frank's conclusion to all situations in which healing occurs. The
primitive witch doctor may catch the disease demon on a thread, seal it in a
bottle, and sink the bottle in the sea. The New Age practitioner might write the
problem on a piece of paper, burn the paper, and scatter the ashes to the wind.
Biomedicine may dress the patient in a peculiar white gown and pass his body
through a tunnel-like machine. All these rituals are part of a healing ceremony,
and they evoke faith in an outcome; they play on the imagination and the
emotions of the participants. Hypnosis, Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, crystals,
creative visualization, affirmations, prayer -- all provide lessons in faith:
The subject submits to a higher power.
In this chapter, I have given a very generalized list of placebos and nocebos,
but the number of nocebos and placebos is inexhaustible. For that reason,
self-awareness is essential. Know thyself; know what arouses pessimism and a
dark vision and what awakens hope and energy. Know what inspires confidence,
optimism, and the emotions you associate with well-being. Know what arouses
fear, pessimism, and negativity.
When we recognize that a placebo for one person will not necessarily be a
placebo for another and recognize that we cannot control all the variables of a
sick person's life, we return to the critical flaw in biomedicine. The
scientific method must control the boundaries of the object under examination.
It must regard the object under examination as a whole thing. But the
combination of person/milieu/time that is involved in all healing is both
dynamic and without boundaries.
Medicine asks what specifically causes this or that healing and it is always
looking for a particular thing or procedure. The interrogative should not be
what, it should be how. How does healing take place? This question leads us to
look for the common element in all healing. This question acknowledges that
there are myriad modes and contradictory means, all of which have resulted in
healing. As the wise saying goes, "Each of us guards a gate of change that
can only be unlocked from the inside."
If medicine can never predict what will cure a given person, how then can we
ever rely on a given cure? We can't. But we can learn to know ourselves. We can
trigger the placebo effect.
Galen was the scientific mind, par excellence, of his era, and for a long
time he looked upon nonscientific cures as old wives' tales. Yet, ultimately, he
acknowledged the superior power of faith. He directed physicians to "try
magical remedies when all else failed and whenever a patient frankly confessed
his belief in their virtue."
Jesus' disciples talk almost exclusively of faith, and they do not always
mean faith in Jesus, just as Jesus does not only mean faith in himself. When
they speak of faith, they mean faith qua faith: the principle of faith,
faith-fullness, faith as a child has faith, a heart willing to believe -- an
open heart. "Ye of little faith" -- you who are the skeptics, the
cynics, the jaded, the immovable, the closed-hearted -- even Jesus would not be
able to heal you.
One final word. For years I held the truth of my healing, like a poker
player, close to my chest -- because when I spoke of cancer, I was confronted by
the terror of others, erroneous advice, and dire warnings. So, if you are
stepping onto the path of self-healing, my final suggestion is to keep silent
about your attempts or achievements. To paraphrase what Jesus said to the healed
blind man, do not stop at the village, but go straight home. For unless others
are embarked upon the same journey, they will be sorely threatened and will
attempt to wrench you from your path with "facts" and fears. When the
reality of self-healing has become so rooted in your consciousness that no other
reality is thinkable, then you can speak.
 This
article is excerpted from the book:
Faith and the Placebo Effect: An Argument for Self Healing
by
Lolette Kuby.
©2001. Reprinted with permission of the publisher, Origin Press. www.originpress.com
Info/Order
this book.
About the Author
Previous
to the unusual events that led up to the writing of this book, Lolette Kuby,
Ph.D., was a widely-published poet and critic, as well as political activist and
advocate for the arts. She has been a university English teacher and
professional editor and writer. Uncertain in her beliefs, there was little in
her previous way of life that prepared her for the healing epiphany and
spiritual revelation that led her to develop the radical argument presented in Faith
and the Placebo Effect.
| Comments () >> |
 |
 |
