Placebo Effect

THE PLACEBO EFFECT:
If you remain unconvinced that thoughts and emotions underlie physical problems, please consider the "Placebo Effect." A placebo is a harmless substance, such as a sugar pill, given as a medicine to a patient in order to placate him or her (how many people feel cheated if they leave the doctor's office without a prescription?), or used as a control in testing the effectiveness of a drug. As example of this, please refer to the study: Listening to Prozac But Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication in the electronic journal Prevention & Treatment at: http://journal.apa.org/prevention. It shows that the efficacy of antidepressants is mainly due to the placebo effect, not to the medication itself, according psychology professor Irving Kirsch. Through The Freedom Of Information Act, Dr Kirsch was able to analyze the FDA data of 47 placebo controlled clinical trials regarding the six most commonly prescribed antidepressants. He discovered that 75% of the response to medication for depression was a result of the patient being in treatment (the clinical trial), while at the most 25% of the response was a true drug effect. Kirsh noted, "This study suggests that antidepressants function as active placebos, in which the side effects [patients were informed of] amplify the placebo effect by convincing patients that they are receiving a potent drug.... Although almost everyone controls for placebo effects, almost no one evaluates them." If this astounding study interests you, please read the following article by Gary Greenberg: Is it Prozac? Or Placebo? (Click)

The "Healer" is You!
The stronger the thought pattern, the harder it is to heal an ailment and the more chronic the condition. This is why during a session some parts of the body may heal faster or more easily than others. Also, each healer holds a unique energy frequency, just as a saxophone is different from a flute. Both instruments produce a particular and special sound but the intensity of air flow required by each of them differs. Another distinction is the power of the instrument itself. This explains why a certain practitioner may not be able to help to heal a particular person or condition. Please keep in mind that both instruments can produce harmonious or discordant music, depending on the skill, emotional state or mental attitude of the musician. Thus, discernment is important and it is wise to follow your "gut reaction" in deciding upon a course of healing. Wellness ultimately depends upon your willingness to change and heal the mindset creating the disorder, otherwise another physical problem or accident is likely to occur. Remember, a "healer" never cures anyone or any condition because the recipient's will cannot be breached, unless a victim mind pattern exists. This shows that there is no healing outside of self-healing. A therapist or doctor can only help you to heal. See: No therapy.

Connecting with your Inner Source
Are you satisfied with your life? Have you roamed form personal workshop to workshop? Have you gone from one relationship to another, to be disappointed again? Have you suffered from depression, addiction, burnout, or anxiety, never seeming to fathom the primal cause? Do you feel like you're spinning your spiritual wheels, going from one credo to the next? How many books have promised you spiritual enlightenment? Many people have the feeling that in their quest to know the Supreme Soul, they are on a horizontal path, dependent upon a belief in a certain book, person, group or dogma. Finding your soul identity enables you to surge onto the circuit of higher consciousness, opening the vertical channel to the Source. When your heart and mind are liberated from their emotional prison, you can enjoy a direct pathway to God. It is Carla's privilege to help you attain this. She harbors no religious dogma and she is a nondenominational (interfaith) minister.
The primary job of a minister is to help people to connect with the Eternal Creator, the energy of which resides within everyone of us. Carla aids people in connecting with this Inner Resource via the Central Inner Alignment, and with their true Inner Nature emotionally through the Bio-Emotional Balancing process. God is real when felt in your heart. Then you will feel truly grounded and more secure in yourself and in your life.

Carla has observed that people desire three basic things in life: to love, to be loved and to feel God in their heart. Everything else is window dressing that helps us to experience these feelings. For example, a house provides us with a place in which to share our lives and love. Hugging or making love allows us to show and give our affection to each other. How much fun is attending a special event without someone to accompany us? Whom do we tell our wonderful news to? Life is akin to a movie. At the end of life, all we'll have left is the emotional experience of having participated in it. When we pass on, we won't take any possessions with us, only the experience of having loved and have been loved.

As children, we crave for our parents to love and to accept us just as we are. They in turn also need their parents' full love and acceptance. How many of us received it? We see generations of casualties yearning for approval from those who matter most. Loneliness is epidemic in this world of the brokenhearted. Childhood sadness can saturate the soul and cellular memories carry on. We can also retain energy from other existences, some affecting us more than others. Emotional pain is just at real as physical and can be more malignant. Alleviating your physical symptoms with a quick fix doesn't help you in the long run. You are not a mechanical robot to be repaired! But when you are physically ill, it's hard to deal with heavy emotions. Therefore, I try to relieve as much pain as possible before going into deeper emotional issues. My primary purpose is to help transform suffering into vitality, centeredness, and well-being.

"Whatever you do, you need courage. Whatever course you decide upon, there is always someone to tell you you are wrong. There are always difficulties arising which tempt you to believe that your critics are right. To map out a course of action and follow it to the end, requires some of the same courage which a soldier needs. Peace has its victories, but it takes brave men to win them." -- Emerson

Placebo Effect:
The mind makes it real
There have been many, many documented cases where a doctor or an oncologist told patients they had some particular disease, then the patient spontaneously developed consistent observable symptoms of that disease, even creating skin lesions, warts, or tumors. Later, when it was discovered that the doctor was wrong in the initial diagnosis, and the mistake was explained to the patient, these symptoms vanished overnight.

It is as if the symptoms of "disease" were created by the mind of the patients because they believed so strongly in the authority and credibility of their primary physicians or healthcare providers. That power of authority to control the outcome in a patient is not at all understood by conventional doctors. In fact, they dismiss it as complete nonsense.

That is interesting given the fact that clinical trials prove the power of placebo. You will find that in virtually every clinical trial that has ever been done with placebos, the placebo has been more universally effective than any other therapy known to modern science. Giving a patient something, even something that is inert, and telling them it will help them causes positive changes in about one-third of all medical conditions, including depression, blood pressure, high cholesterol, heart disease, diabetes and more. The placebo effect works on just about everything.

Yet, conventional doctors dismiss this. They do not understand it and, in fact, misuse it. That is where they first do harm to patients. The minute you go in to see a doctor, and you get a label for a condition that is a name for some kind of disease, symptom, or disorder, the very labeling of you as a patient is all by itself extremely harmful. It makes you believe you "HAVE" something, and that it must be a real disease since it now has a name. Yet, this source of harm goes completely unrecognized by conventional medicine.

http://www.newstarget.com/index.html

Depression and the Placebo Effect

Placebo treatments much stronger than previously thought
by Ethan A. Huff, staff writer

(NaturalNews) A recent study published in the British medical journal, Lancet, has found that placebo, or fake, medical treatments exhibit a noticeable biological effect on patients. A panel of international researchers pored through a series of studies they believe illustrate concrete evidence that physical changes in patients occur in response to placebos.

One of the studies included in the research involved Parkinson's disease patients whose brains released dopamine in response to placebo treatment. The dopamine release triggered a series of other changes throughout the brain, resulting in improved health for these patients.

"When you think you're going to get a drug that helps, your brain reacts as if it's getting relief," explained Walter Brown, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Brown and Tufts University, in an interview. Brown believes that people with mild depression or anxiety are perfect candidates for placebo treatments because such patients benefit just as well from fake treatments as they do from drug treatments.

Others were quick to note their belief that the inert substances in placebos do not actually cause a change, but rather the belief that they are causing a change is what is helping. These same experts admit that they do not fully understand how the process works to actually trigger an effect in the brain, but that somehow it does.

As placebos gain popularity, many in the medical profession are trying to figure out how to effectively use them. Part of the theory behind how a placebo works is that the patient does not know he is receiving a placebo. If doctors were to administer placebos instead of drugs, would it be unethical not to disclose this fact? These are some of the questions experts are trying to answer.

According to Brown, disclosing to patients that they are receiving a placebo, but also telling them that it could be very effective, could be a viable method of prescribing the treatment without being deceptive.

Doctors should be careful to verify the contents of placebos if they decide to use them, since many would argue that no ingredient is truly inert. Many standard placebos are made by pharmaceutical companies who do not disclose the contents of the pills. Some of them could contain trace amounts of drugs or other substances that may become problematic.

With so many natural remedies available, there is no reason to administer placebo's except as a last resort treatment option.

http://www.naturalnews.com/z028575_placebo_effect_medicine.html

Placebo Effect Breakthrough: It's Not Just in the Mind. It Actually Alters Physiological Response of the Spine
by David Gutierrez, staff writer

(NaturalNews) The placebo effect can be traced in part to physical changes that take place in the spine when a fake drug is taken, according to a study conducted by researchers from the University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf in Germany, and published in the journal Science.

The placebo effect refers to a phenomenon in which a person's symptoms diminish after taking a biologically inactive treatment that they believe to be a real drug. It is a well-documented effect that is particularly strong for conditions originating in the central nervous system, such as pain and depression.

"These results provide direct evidence for spinal inhibition as one mechanism of placebo analgesia and highlight that psychological factors can act on the earliest stages of pain processing in the central nervous system," the researchers wrote.

Researchers told 15 healthy men that their arms were being treated with two separate creams - one of them an anesthetic, the other a placebo. They then applied painful heat to the treated sections of the participants arms while taking a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scan of their spinal cords.

Both creams were, in fact, medically inactive placebos. Yet the men not only reported experiencing significantly less pain when treated with a cream they believed to be active, but the fMRI scans showed that the activity of the nerves in their spine was also significantly reduced. This shows that when given a placebo, the mind is not just filtering pain away - the body actually feels less.

"It is deeply rooted in very, very early areas of the central nervous system. That definitely speaks for a strong effect," lead researcher Falk Eippert said.

The researchers still could not explain how the perception of treatment created an effect in the spine, however. They suggested that the body might respond to treatment with a perceived drug by releasing its own natural painkillers.

Sources for this story include: www.reuters.com; www.medicalnewstoday.com.