Connections to Health - Witchdoctors are still among us

THE ISHTA HOLISTIC HEALTH CENTRE

CONNECTIONS to HEALTH

Witchdoctors are still among us

As I was perusing through an old New Scientist magazine (Dec 06 Ed.) a few weeks ago week, my eye alighted on an interview with a Patrick Lemoine. This orthodox French psychiatrist made the astonishing admission that something like 35-40 per cent of all official prescriptions given patients are 'impure' placebos. By that he means a pharmacologically inactive substance -a sugar pill -'contaminated' with a little bit of active ingredient. It's not enough to have a clinical effect but just enough for doctors to claim that it does.
The good French doctor was basically saying more than a third of all prescriptions are dummy pills and if they work at all, it's because of the power of the mind.
That statistic blew my mind. Here was an orthodox psychiatrist, up until recently, the head of a psychiatric services at a hospital in Lyon, admitting that a giant chunk of doctors count on a patient's belief in the drug.
Doesn't this sound like the charges usually leveled against homoeopathy by orthodoxy? (Ed.)
The placebo effect has shown that beliefs are powerful, even when the belief is false. The placebo is a form of intention - an instance of intention trickery. When a doctor gives a patient a placebo, or sugar pill, he or she is counting on the patient's belief that the drug will work.
It is well documented that belief in a placebo will create the same physiological effects as that of an active agent - so much so that it causes the pharmaceutical industry big headaches when designing drug trials. So many patients receive the same relief and even the same side effects with a placebo as with the drug itself that a placebo is not a true control.
Our bodies do not distinguish between a chemical process and the thought of a chemical process.
Witchdoctors

Lemoine says that the placebo effect "rests in the relationship between the patient and the doctor" - the belief on the part of the patient that what the doctor has given him will work.
"It is what remains of the craft of the witch doctor, because unless you really know what you are doing, it's unpredictable," says Lemoine. "Doctors hate not to be able to predict or control the outcome of a treatment, because it makes them feel like charlatans."
This is why, in Lemoine's view, they prescribe 'impure' placebos. "This way they can fool themselves, at the same time as they fool their patients, that the treatment has predictable, scientifically tested effects."
I remember reading about a study once that proved that it was the patient's belief in the doctor's 'power' that had mostly to do with his getting better. What he actually took-whether real drug or placebo-made absolutely no difference.
The study involved 46,000 heart patients, half of whom were taking a placebo. After examining the statistics of who got better, the researchers made the astonishing discovery that patients taking a placebo fared as well as those on the heart drug.
The only factor determining survival seemed to be belief that the therapy will work and a willingness to follow it religiously.
Those who stuck to doctor's orders to take their drug three times a day fared equally well whether they were taking a drug or just a sugar pill. Patients who tended not to survive were those who had been lax with their regimen, regardless of whether they had been given a placebo or an actual drug.
Dummy dopamine

The power of the placebo was best illustrated by a group of patients treated for Parkinson's disease, a motor system disorder in which the body's system for releasing the brain chemical dopamine is faulty. The standard treatment for Parkinson's is a synthetic form of dopamine.
In a study at the University of British Columbia, a team of doctors demonstrated with PET scanning that, when patients given placebos were told they had received dopamine, their brains substantially increased the release of their own stores of the chemical (Science, 2001: 293: 1164-6).
In another dramatic instance, at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Dr Bruce Moseley, a specialist in orthopaedics, recruited 150 patients with severe osteoarthritis of the knee and divided them into three groups.
Two-thirds were either given arthroscopic lavage (which washes out degenerative tissue and debris with the aid of a little viewing tube) or another form of debridement (which sucks it out with a tiny vacuum cleaner). The third group were given a sham operation: The patients were surgically prepared, placed under anaesthesia and wheeled into the operating room. Incisions were made in their knees, but no procedure carried out.
Over the next two years, during which time none of the patients knew who had received the real operations and who had received the placebo treatment, all three groups reported moderate improvements in pain and function. In fact, the placebo group reported better results than some who had received the actual operation (New England Journal of Medicine, 2002; 347: 81-88).
The mental expectation of healing was enough to marshal the body's healing mechanisms. The intention, brought about by the expectation of a successful operation, produced the physical change.

The doctor's own placebo

But what was most astonishing of all about Lemoine's interview was his disclosure that doctors also grow to believe in the power of their own placebo 'sorcery'. The power of THEIR minds also seems to be involved in the healing process.
It's not "uncommon", says Lemoine, for a doctor to lose respect for a patient when the patient fails to respond to treatment. "He may decide the patient is imagining or faking his symptoms."
This becomes a vicious circle of doubt. The doctor's lack of respect gets transmitted to the patient, and then he, in turn, is less likely to believe in the doctor. "Any treatment he then prescribes is less likely to be effective and may even produce unpleasant side effects," says Lemoine.
This is called the 'nocebo' effect and it means the power of the mind to believe an inert substance causes harm.
Remarkable Case

Perhaps the most remarkable case concerned a woman called Annie, whose severe depression landed her in a Lemoine's psychiatric hospital for more than a decade. Most of her days were spent curled up in an armchair in the corner of her ward. After Lemoine struck up a friendship with her, he persuaded her to take part in a trial of a new antidepressant. She agreed and responded so well to the drug that she was able to leave the hospital. Subsequently she found both an apartment and a boyfriend. Her case in fact may have helped get the drug on the market.
Much later, when the ward was being redecorated, Lemoine found the antidepressant pills Annie was supposed to have taken, buried deep in the folds of her armchair. She'd hid them away, he realised, and when he checked he discovered she hadn't taken even one.
Let's here it for the placebo

Instances like this convince me that for the most part, we don't need drugs, just our sincere belief that something is going to work.
Rather than continuing to give people toxic substances to try and suppress their symptoms why doesn't medicine use the placebio effect creatively?

This article was written by Lynne McTaggart of "What Doctors Don't Tell You". For more interesting information go to the WDDTY web site.