Mind Over Illness: The Placebo Effect

Your thoughts have more power than you realize. It is now being discovered that if the mind dwells on any illness for a certain period of time, the body is being conditioned for that disease, and a change in outlook and attitude can enhance the body’s natural healing system.

One major example to the workings of mind and body and as a potential key to activating true healing is the placebo effect. The word placebo is Latin and means ‘I shall please.’ In medical terminology, it refers to a sugar pill or treatment to humor, rather than to medicate a patient. Yet the results are often quite startling and demonstrate the power that a belief system over the self-restorative capacity of the body.

The late Henry Beecher, noted anesthesiologist at Harvard University, who reviewed studies of placebo treatments for dozens of ailments, found that 35 percent of over a hundred patients experienced satisfactory relief of placebos used instead of regular medication for a wide range of medical problems. He suggested that such placebo-induced results are not simply the effects of the imagination but are the results of actual physical change. Dr. Stewart Wolf of St. Luke in Bethlehem , discovered that a placebo can produce abnormal numbers of a certain type of blood cell in the immune system or reduce the amount of fat and protein in the blood.