From Placebo to Nocebo: How Mindset Transforms Healing – NaPodPoMo

In today’s episode of Self Powered Healing, I’m going to talk about the placebo effect and its counterpart, the nocebo effect.

The term placebo comes from Latin roots meaning, “I shall please.” Placebo effect has its roots in 18th century, where doctors would give a patient drugs or treatments that they knew had no objective medicinal value, in an effort to please or satisfy the customer, and they often saw significant healing. It did provide relief for the patients. Although it was really mainly a way to make stubborn patients go away. Over time, doctors realized that these placebos did have an effect.

The dictionary defines placebo as a substance that has no therapeutic effect, but that is used as a control in testing new drugs. The placebo effect is a beneficial effect that’s produced by a placebo drug or treatment, which cannot be attributed to the properties of the placebo itself, and must therefore be due to the patient’s belief in the treatment. You probably heard of the placebo being the sugar pill, which it can be, but it can also be a surgery or any other treatment.

Dr. David Hamilton from Scotland earned his PhD in organic chemistry, and he once worked in the pharmaceutical industry. At that job, he created various drugs which then needed to be tested. Trials involved patients on the real drug and other patients on a sugar pill, a placebo. For some of the studies he worked on, the effect of the placebo was close to that of the actual drug.

In a Hay House Summit in 2018, he said, “But what was amazing is believing in the drug, or believing in a doctor, or believing in something, was actually producing– you’re producing your own biology, and your own biology, produced by your mind was what was carrying out the healing and overruling the effect of the drug. And I thought this was ridiculously fascinating.”

After four years, he left the pharmaceutical industry saying, “So I resigned after four years because I thought, wouldn’t it be great if people could learn how to harness this ability for themselves? And that would give people a sense of hope and power. Something perhaps they could do in their thinking, adjustments to their thinking, that could perhaps make them healthier.”

The placebo effect has evolved from being thought of as a nuisance in clinical pharmacological research to a biological phenomenon worthy of scientific investigation in its own right.

Now let’s look at the nocebo effect.

The nocebo effect is a term coined by Walter Kennedy in 1961. It comes from the Latin word nocere, meaning to harm. It refers to the negative effect of the doctor’s opinion.

In his book, Quantum Healing, Deepak Chopra says this, “With nocebo, you give a viable drug, but the patient doesn’t respond, because somehow the doctor has signaled that the drug isn’t going to work.” He goes on to say “anything can function as a nocebo, just as anything can function as a placebo. It is not the dummy drug, the doctor’s bedside manner, or the antiseptic smells of the hospital that does harm or good. It’s the patient’s interpretation of it.”

Dr. Chopra tells of findings related to surgery that validate the idea of nocebo. For decades, doctors believed that anesthetized patients were unconscious, and therefore not influenced by what was said and what happened during surgery. But it has since been discovered that people undergoing surgery could hear every word. They may not remember it consciously, but post surgical hypnosis has shown that they do hear and remember what goes on during surgery. Which means that a negative prognosis mentioned during surgery could impact the outcome for the patient.

Dr. Chopra says, “As a result of these findings, which validate the idea of nocebo, it’s now standard practice not to make negative remarks during surgery. The more positive the surgeon’s expressed opinions, in fact, the more positive the outcome for the patient.”

Chopra says that people tend to have two centers of action, the head and the heart. The head is influenced by medical facts and statistics. While the heart is influenced by love and caring, and he suggests that without these ingredients the nocebo effect can run wild. He goes on to suggest that this love and caring is part of the appeal of alternative medicine.

You know, it reminds me of something I found in the Flexner report in my episode about our sick care system. It was said by Mr. Duffy a hundred years after the Flexner report came out, he said “the Flexner report caused medical education to focus more on science and less on the patient.”

I have a little twist to the story of nocebo and placebo. There was a patient, Mr. Wright, a cancer patient. He was dying. He had end stage cancer of the lymph nodes. He read about a new anti-cancer drug that was experimental, but the results were promising. And he begged his doctors to let him try it. Three days after his first injection, he went home. His tumors had melted.

A couple of months passed. And stories started showing up that the drug was turning out to not be a miracle cancer drug after all. Which suggests that for Mr. Wright, the drug had acted as a placebo. Mr. Wright relapsed immediately after reading the news.

His doctor got the idea that he would try something unusual. He told Mr. Wright that those reports were wrong, and he’d just received a new and improved double strength version of the drug. After one injection, the tumors melted away again. Another placebo effect.

For two months, Mr. Wright enjoyed good health, until another report came out that the drug had been debunked. It had not shown any improvement for any of its patients. Mr. Wright relapsed immediately and died within days. Thus, the doctor’s placebo had turned into a nocebo.

I have my own pet theory regarding the placebo effect. My theory says that most modern pharmaceutical drugs work solely because of the placebo effect. Patients take a drug believing it will act as they are told it will, and so they find the relief they need. As for nocebo, I believe you can see its effect anytime you’re in a medical facility or in contact with a doctor.

Thanks for listening today. If you have any comments on this episode or on the whole NaPodPoMo concept in general, you can visit this page to leave comments either on this page or at SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024. You can also find a listing and link for all November’s episodes on that same page: SelfPoweredHealing.com/November2024.  

By the way, Self Powered Healing is still looking for interviews with people who want to share a story of healing. Do you have a healing story? I would love to hear about it and see if maybe you could share it on our show. So if you’re interested in sharing, then visit selfpoweredhealing.com/share to schedule a chat.  

You aren’t committing at this point. You’re just having a chat with me to see what’s going on. It will be confidential unless or until you decide you want to share. And if you get there and there’s not a convenient time for you, send me a message because we’ll always find a time.  

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