How clever would I be were I to write a blog that was not a blog, but rather a placebo for a blog! More clever than I am, certainly. This is only a blog about placebos.

Most of us think of the placebo effect as a sort of brain illusion. In one example, a successful high-tech entrepreneur finds himself with debilitating pain and reduced mobility due to deteriorating lumbar vertebrae. Being a wealthy person, he seeks medical advice from leading researchers at globally prominent venues such as the Mayo Clinic, all of whom advice him to have some of his vertebrae fused. Instead, he embarks on a sort of luxury health vision quest, working with naturopathic healers to cure himself through diet, meditation, and various hands-on methods, and in time becomes both pain-free and active. Medical images of his lumbar spine, however, show no improvement whatsoever.

Mind over matter isn’t the whole story of placebos, though. Researchers studying Parkinson’s sufferers gave some of them drugs developed to boost dopamine, which is the main substance those persons lack, while others got a placebo; in some cases the latter were even told they were receiving a placebo. Nonetheless, the placebo-receivers’ brains produced significant amounts of dopamine, in some cases more than the brains of the medication-receivers. That is, a placebo produced a measurable physical response.

I read these and many other cases in The Magic Feather Effect by Melanie Warner. This book is an easy read, and there are plenty of startling cases. Unfortunately, the author is firmly grounded in conventional western medicine, and although she admits the pill-for-an-ill model might improve with a dollop of cause-seeking and a splash of patient-respect, her goal is clearly to enshrine the placebo effect in its rightful place, below everything that MDs do.

I prefer to believe that the placebo effect can be harnessed for use in actual life. One researcher whose actual job is to identify cases in which physical effects result from placebo-type actions as well as belief systems, has come to respect the positive attitude as a healer of note. He repeatedly finds that positive thinkers get better medical results than negative thinkers do from similar treatments.

This fellow had his faith tested by a painful bout of diverticulitis which was eventually cured by conventional medical interventions, including surgical techniques. Afterward, though, he found himself fearful of a recurrence, unable to stop visualizing a virulent regrowth in his own intestine. After several weeks of near constant worry, he finally snapped to the obvious: His own research predicted that, unless he could view the illness as an aberration in a healthy life, he was upping the odds of it recurring. Happily, he was able to forget about it, and years later has not experienced it again.

I’m working on a similar plan with my gimpy left foot. Nutrients, nature, and naps are all my body needs to self-heal, and I will be able to Morris dance again!

Well, maybe I need a slightly more inspirational goal.