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Holistic Healing and Horoscopes: Products of the Placebo Effect?
The world is full of critics that will denounce holistic medicine and new age beliefs, attributing any positive effects that may result to the placebo effect. At first, this seems like a jab at alternative practices, but if you look at the implications you may find that it’s not such a bad thing after all—in fact, it might be a great thing.
I Shall Please
“Placebo” is a Latin word meaning “I shall please.” For those who are unfamiliar, the word refers to medically ineffectual treatments, such as sugar pills, usually used as a control in scientific studies. You give one person Medicine X and another person a sugar pill, a placebo, and the result should be that Medicine X heals and the placebo does not. Sometimes, however, the person that take the placebo shows improvement in his/her condition for no apparent reason, resulting in what is called the placebo effect.
Placebos Produce Results
During WWII, an anesthetist named Henry Beecher was tending to U.S. troops in the southern part of Italy. One of his nurses, noticing that the morphine supply was running out, comforted a soldier by telling him that he was receiving a shot of a powerful painkiller, though in reality it was just saline solution. Beecher watched as the soldier’s pain was relieved, preventing him from going into shock.
Beecher went on to continue his research on placebos and the placebo effect, writing a paper titled “The Powerful Placebo,” published in The Journal of the American Medical Association in 1955. This paper details how more than a handful of drug trials were bunk because they misattributed their success to the drug being tested, when in reality the success was the result of the placebo effect. It would seem that simply taking a pill and believing that it would work was enough for certain patients.
So what does this have to do with meditation, alternative medicine, and even horoscopes?
Potentially everything. Anybody that has experienced spiritual transcendence from yoga or Ayurveda, any one of the 38 million Americans that have tried out alternative health treatments, and anybody that has had a horoscope describe their day perfectly has experienced something that science doesn’t explain.
Acupuncture, for example, has been traditionally used to regulate the flow of Qi throughout the human body, typically to ease chronic pain in patients. Recent studies have shown that, Qi or not, acupuncture eases pain. This 2010 study shows that: “Patients reported slightly more pain relief when they were treated by someone who said “I’ve had a lot of success with treating knee pain,” compared with a practitioner who took a more neutral stance, saying “It may or may not work for you.””
The Power of Belief
The morphine patient, the acupuncture patients—it seems that all a person has to do is believe that they are receiving help and they will get somewhat better. All of this sounds very much like The Secret, that what you believe you will manifest… but is it really that far off? Crystal healing, meditating, acupuncture, Ayurveda, horoscopes… is it really so simple that all we have to do is believe it will work to make it work?
Whether or not there is healing power in alternative medicine, and whether or not we can better our lives based on future predictions and energies that don’t “vibe with science,” there is some benefit that people find in these practices. It might be the placebo effect causing this benefit, it might not be. If there is an observable benefit, should it matter? You tell me.
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Author, mystic, and tarot reader Dawn Fairchild has been practicing holistic medicine and spiritual healing for 14 years. She is a devotee of the Sacred Feminine and a seasoned aromatherapy and Ayurveda practitioner. She also enjoys horoscope writing, and has been featured on Oranum.
Read more from Paranormal Old Pueblo on http://www.paranromaloldpueblo.com and at http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/paranormal.
2013-02-16 11:00:14
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