From ... in Alternative News — Sep 16, 2018

People Are Taking Placebo Pills To Deal With Health Problems & It’s Working

People are now involved in studies where they are told they are taking a placebo medication, and it in fact is one, and they are being healed..

The mainstream is finally picking up on mind-body connection. Is this the true power of our mind? Our consciousness? When we want to get better deep down, do we not make that decision in our mind and thus heal? What does this say about harmful and side effect-ridden medications? An article published in Scientific American is a clear marker for showing just how much the mainstream has caught on to the fact that the mind-body connection is much more powerful than we previously thought, and could explain why more and more people are gravitating towards alternative forms of medicine. A growing body of scientific research suggests that our mind can play an important role in healing our body – or in staying healthy in the first place...There are now several lines of research suggesting that our mental perception of the world constantly informs and guides our immune system in a way that makes us better able to respond to future threats. – Dr. Bruce Lipton, from The Biology of Belief Health is one area where we can clearly see how our mind is connected to physical material reality, and how non-material science is going to play an even more important role as we move through 2018 and beyond. It’s not just health though, research in the areas of neuroscience and quantum physics is also showing how vital our thoughts, perceptions, emotions and feelings (factors associated with consciousness) are with regards to understanding the true nature of our reality. Mind influencing matter is no longer something that’s being trivialized.

There are even declassified intelligence agency documents and peer-reviewed studies that have been published that clearly show an effect at both the quantum level, and the classical mechanical level as well. If you want to learn more about this, a great place to start is with the Institute of Noetic Sciences, founded by Apollo 14 Astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell. It’s really no surprise to see this topic pop up all over mainstream media outlets, it’s a common occurrence these days. When something so spectacular gains attention and becomes so obvious, it’s almost impossible to ignore, despite the fact that its discovery has been around for decades. Time magazine recently published an article about a woman (now a 71-year old medical assistant) and her struggle with irritable bowel syndrome (IBS). She tried everything, from drugs to changing her diet. It was a horrible way to live, she told the Times, as she was often huddled in a corner and keeled over in pain. It’s something that can really debilitate your life. Approximately ten years ago today, she decided to enroll herself into a study, a first of its kind clinical trial, one where the patient would be receiving a placebo pill.

The pill had no active ingredients, and she felt “deflated,” that she got her hopes up for nothing. Three weeks later, after taking the pill twice daily, Buonanno (the 71-year old medical assistant) was symptom free. She had never gone so long without an attack. “I didn’t have a clue what was going on,” she says. “I still don’t.” The placebo effect is a non-therapeutic treatment (like a sham pill), and it improves a patient’s physical condition. This has been documented for centuries.

The interesting thing about the study the woman decided to participate in, is the fact that patients taking the placebo pill were well aware that they were taking a placebo. With traditional placebo studies, patients are made to believe that they are taking something that will benefit them and improve their condition. In 2009, Harvard Medical School launched the first open-label placebo, where patients knew what they were taking, and they started with people who had IBS, including the 71- year old woman. As Time points out, The findings were surprising. Nearly twice as many people in the trial who knowingly received placebo pills reported experiencing adequate symptom relief, compared with the people who received no treatment. Not only that but the men and women taking the placebo also doubled their rates of improvement to a point that was about equal to the effects of two IBS medications that were commonly used at the time.

The team of researchers, alongside a team at the Program in Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, have secured a $2.5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to replicate the study mentioned above. So far, researchers have treated 270 patients and intend to treat approximately 100 more with IBV via their ongoing clinical trial. Despite the fact that the Placebo effect has been documented for well over one-hundred years, experts still can’t pinpoint what underlies this mechanism. It seems quite simple to me: it’s consciousness and the basic biology of belief. Some people argue that that the human body does not respond to treatment, but instead, the ritual of treatment.

The actual pill has no effect, so what else could it be? What’s interesting is that the effect is now demonstrated even when the person knows it’s just a placebo! There is no money in the placebo, which is why we probably haven’t heard about it much, or not enough attention is paid to it. Today, it’s well recognized in modern medicine, doctors at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center, for example, have shown that fake surgeries – slicing people’s knees open and sewing them back together without any treatment at all – provide the same improvements for people with osteoarthritis of the knee as real knee surgery. Isn’t that remarkable? Another example comes from a study published in 2002 by the New England Journal of Medicine which looked at surgery for patients with severe debilitating knee pain. It’s long been thought that there is no placebo effect observed in surgery, but this just isn’t true. This study divided people into three groups, for one group the surgeons saved the damaged cartilage in the knee. For another, they flushed out the knee joint by removing all of the material believed to be causing inflammation.

The third group received a fake surgery, the patients were simply sedated and tricked into thinking that they actually had the surgery. All three groups went through the same rehab process, and the results were astonishing.

The placebo group improved just as much as the other two groups who had the surgery.

The placebo effect should be the subject of major, funded research efforts. If medical researchers could figure out how to leverage the placebo effect, they would hand doctors an efficient, energy-based, side effect-free tool to treat disease. Energy healers say they already have such tools, but I am a scientist, and I believe the more we know about the science of the placebo, the better we’ll be able to use it in clinical settings. – Bruce Lipton, Ph.D (Taken from his book Biology of Belief – Highly recommended to learn more about this phenomenon) A 2002 article published in the American Psychological Association’s Prevention Treatment, conducted by University of Connecticut Psychology Professor Irving Kirsch and titled “The Emperor’s New Drugs,” made some more shocking discoveries (source)(source). Kirsch found that 80% of the effectiveness of antidepressants, as measured in clinical trials, could be attributed to the placebo effect. Kirsch even filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request to get information on the clinical trials of the top antidepressants. “The difference between the response of the drugs and the response of the placebo was less than two points on average on this clinical scale that goes from fifty to sixty points. That’s a very small difference, that difference is clinically meaningless,” Professor Kirsch explains. (source) Studies examining non-physical healing go beyond the placebo.

There are hundreds of studies examining the effect of human intention (the human mind) and how it can also alter physical material reality as well as our health. I go into more detail on these topics in the article linked below, so please feel free to check it out if interested! This Is How Powerful The Mind-Body Connection Really Is .

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People Are Taking Placebo Pills To Deal With Health Problems & It’s Working

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