Power Of Placebo Effect Quotes

Belief is the most powerful thing in the universe. It's similar to the placebo effect, whatever you truly believe, you eventually make true.

It’s called the Placebo effect.

The power of suggestion makes some people sick and other people well.

To be less dumb, remember your propensity for post hoc postulation and the power positive permutations of the placebo effect have to pollute your perspicacity.

Migraines are described as “one of the most common” pain syndromes, affecting as much as 12 percent of the population.63 That’s common? How about menstrual cramps, which plague up to 90 percent of younger women?64 Can ginger help? Even just one-eighth of a teaspoon of ginger powder three times a day dropped pain from an eight to a six on a scale of one to ten, and down further to a three in the second month.65 And these women hadn’t been taking ginger all month; they started the day before their periods began, suggesting that even if it doesn’t seem to help much the first month, women should try sticking with it. What about the duration of pain? A quarter teaspoon of ginger powder three times a day was found to not only drop the severity of menstrual pain from about seven down to five but decrease the duration from a total of nineteen hours in pain down to about fifteen hours,66 significantly better than the placebo, which were capsules filled with powdered toast. But women don’t take bread crumbs for their cramps. How does ginger compare to ibuprofen? Researchers pitted one-eighth of a teaspoon of powdered ginger head-to-head against 400 mg of ibuprofen, and the ginger worked just as effectively as this leading drug.67 Unlike the drug, ginger can also reduce the amount of menstrual bleeding, from around a half cup per period down to a quarter cup.68 What’s more, ginger intake of one-eighth of a teaspoon twice daily started a week before your period can yield a significant drop in premenstrual mood, physical, and behavioral symptoms.69 I like sprinkling powdered ginger on sweet potatoes or using it fresh to make lemon-ginger apple chews as an antinausea remedy. (Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve suffered from motion sickness.) There is an array of powerful antinausea

Scientists now believe it’s even possible that our genetic expression fluctuates on a moment-to-moment basis. The research is revealing that our thoughts and feelings, as well as our activities—that is, our choices, behaviors, and experiences—have profound healing and regenerative effects on our bodies, as the men in the monastery study discovered. Thus your genes are being affected by your interactions with your family, friends, co-workers, and spiritual practices, as well as your sexual habits, your exercise levels, and the types of detergents you use. The latest research shows that approximately 90 percent of genes are engaged in cooperation with signals from the environment.8 And if our experience is what activates a good number of our genes, then our nature is influenced by nurturing. So why not harness the power of these ideas so that we can do everything possible to maximize our health and minimize our dependence on the prescription pad?

Placebo effect is where the drug causes greater effect and thereby faith accentuates, prolongs and promulgates the strength of the drug. Faith in an object that is known creates a strength in the object's reaction in a more powerful manner, provided the object was intended to create positive in the first place. Yet if this faith is turned inward in a negative manner, it can hinder the effectiveness of the drug or creative power of the thing being used for the positive, this is called the nocebo effect.

The researchers tried a clever tactic to overcome this problem. They created a number of recipes for common foods including muffins and pasta in which they could disguise placebo ingredients like bran and molasses to match the texture and color of the flax-laden foods. This way, they could randomize people into two groups and secretly introduce tablespoons of daily ground flaxseeds into the diets of half the participants to see if it made any difference. After six months, those who ate the placebo foods started out hypertensive and stayed hypertensive, despite the fact that many of them were on a variety of blood pressure pills. On average, they started the study at 155/81 and ended it at 158/81. What about the hypertensives who were unknowingly eating flaxseeds every day? Their blood pressure dropped from 158/82 down to 143/75. A seven-point drop in diastolic blood pressure may not sound like a lot, but that would be expected to result in 46 percent fewer strokes and 29 percent less heart disease over time.125 How does that result compare with taking drugs? The flaxseeds managed to drop subjects’ systolic and diastolic blood pressure by up to fifteen and seven points, respectively. Compare that result to the effect of powerful antihypertensive drugs, such as calcium-channel blockers (for example, Norvasc, Cardizem, Procardia), which have been found to reduce blood pressure by only eight and three points, respectively, or to ACE inhibitors (such as Vasotec, Lotensin, Zestril, Altace), which drop patients’ blood pressure by only five and two points, respectively.126 Ground flaxseeds may work two to three times better than these medicines, and they have only good side effects. In addition to their anticancer properties, flaxseeds have been demonstrated in clinical studies to help control cholesterol, triglyceride, and blood sugar levels; reduce inflammation, and successfully treat constipation.127 Hibiscus Tea for Hypertension Hibiscus tea, derived from the flower of the same name, is also known as roselle, sorrel, jamaica, or sour tea. With

Your mind is the most powerful thing in your control.

After decades of observing athletes and their habits, Martin has concluded that most popular recovery modalities work by exploiting the placebo effect. But he doesn’t see that as a reason to dismiss them. On the contrary, he views it as an opportunity. This is real mojo, and instead of calling it the placebo effect he prefers the terms “anticipatory response” or “belief effects.” He uses these alternative names, because people tend to dismiss the word placebo as a synonym for ineffective, when, in fact, these effects are real, and in some cases can be as powerful as many drugs. The difference is that you’re gathering up your body’s own resources to create the benefit.

This finding suggests that the placebo effect explains the apparent clinical effectiveness of antidepressants. In other words, improvements in mood may be a result of the patient’s belief in the power of the drug—not the drug itself.74

Belief in the healing power of some person, place, or thing can also be a key to success. This is the realm of placebo responses and miracle shrines. We do not seem to be able to will healing responses to occur, because our will does not connect directly to the autonomic nervous system and other controlling mechanisms of the healing system. Yet we can circumvent that obstacle by projecting belief in healing onto something external and interacting with it. I have already noted that if physicians understood this process and were better trained to work with projected belief, they would better fulfill their roles as shaman/priests and be much more effective at helping sick people get well.

Skeptics might argue that pharmaceutical companies will fight anything that casts their products in a dubious light - especially if it results in people using lower doses across the board - but the truth is that, for many drug companies, reliable information on the placebo effect can't come soon enough. To pass muster, a drug must outperform placebo. But a 2001 study of antidepressant drug trials showed that while drug efficacy is rising, placebo rates are rising faster. It's almost ironic; the factors behind this are many and varied, but a significant contributor is our society's knowledge of - and belief in - the power of medicines. The pharmaceutical industry's palpable success means that unless something radical happens, it could soon be, like the Red Queen, running to stand still.

Pain is particularly susceptible to the power of suggestion. If you previously obtained pain relief by taking an aspirin, you expect the same benefit when someone hands you a similar-looking pill, even though it may be a placebo. This form of analgesia can be blocked by the opioid antagonist naloxone, implying that your belief recruits your body’s own opioid-like substances called endorphins. This is in line with what my mother told me about when she assisted her father, a surgeon, in operations in the hospital’s bunker during the Allied bombing campaign in World War II Berlin: when they ran out of morphine, the injured received, unbeknownst to them, a harmless saline injection that nevertheless provided relief. Placebos don’t just work for pain or depression. Belief helps improve motor symptoms in Parkinson’s disease and shapes immune response. The placebo effect is everywhere.21

The victim’s belief in the power of the curse itself to kill him was only part of the psychological soup that brought about his ultimate demise, Cannon said. Another factor was the effect of being socially ostracized and rejected, even by the victim’s own family. Such people quickly became the walking dead.

Many were able to rid themselves of chronic lifelong symptoms, such as specific phobias, panic attacks, recurrent nightmares, unexplained fears, obesity, repeated destructive relationships, physical pain and illness, and so on. This is not a placebo effect. Generally, these are not people who are gullible or suggestible. They remember—names, dates, geography, details. And after they remember, like Catherine, they become cured.

There is a whole lot of power in positive thinking. It is the great placebo effect. In many case, even dire cases, it works.

On the one hand, I recognize the power of the placebo effect: if you believe it’s working, it may well work. If you think an object brings you luck, you are more confident. And yet what the Italian students in the “lucky” seats showed wasn’t confidence; it was overconfidence. They thought they were doing better, but the evidence didn’t actually back them up. And then there’s the flip side of the placebo, the nocebo effect: the belief in evil signs or bad luck. It turns out people can literally scare themselves to death. If you think you’ve been cursed or otherwise made ill, you may end up actually getting sick, failing to improve poor health, or, yes, dying altogether. In one medically documented instance, a man was given three months to live after a diagnosis of metastatic cancer of the esophagus. He died shortly after. When his body was autopsied, doctors realized that he had been misdiagnosed: he did indeed have cancer, but a tiny, non-metastatic tumor on his liver. Clinically speaking, it could not have killed him. But, it seems, being told he was dying of a fatal illness brought about that very outcome. In another case, a man thought he was hexed by a voodoo priest. He came close to death, only to recover miraculously after an enterprising doctor “reversed” the curse through a series of made-up words. In yet a third, a man almost died in the emergency room after overdosing on pills. He’d been in a drug trial for depression and decided to end his life with the antidepressants he’d been prescribed. His vitals were so bad when he was admitted that doctors didn’t think he would make it—until they discovered his blood was completely clear of any drugs. He’d been taking a placebo. Once he found out he had not in fact taken a life-threatening quantity of pills, he recovered quickly. The effect our mind has on our body makes for a scary proposition. Belief is a powerful thing. Our mental state is crucial to our performance. And ultimately, while some superstitions may give you a veneer of false confidence, they also have the power to destroy your mental equilibrium. I like to think of this as the black cat effect. You see one cross the parking lot as you walk to a tournament. You brood about the bad luck. Your game is thrown off. You blame the cat. You bust. You feel validated. Superstitions are false attributions, so they give you a false sense of your own abilities and in the end, impede learning.

For these reasons, melatonin is not a powerful sleeping aid in and of itself, at least not for healthy, non-jet-lagged individuals (we’ll explore jet lag—and how melatonin can be helpful—in a moment). There may be little, if any, quality melatonin in the pill. That said, there is a significant sleep placebo effect of melatonin, which should not be underestimated: the placebo effect is, after all, the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology. Equally important to realize is the fact that over-the-counter melatonin is not commonly regulated by governing bodies around

the placebo effect is, after all, the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology.