Medicine and Magical Thinking

Placebos, Nocebos, The Power of Belief & True Healing

Medicine is closer to magic than it is to physics.

Sure, we can map out the biochemistry of the body and figure out that if we press here it will do that, but pressing those buttons also causes 1000s of other knock-on effects that are difficult if not impossible to predict in any particular patient, which is why drug monographs are so long.

It’s not just the incredible complexity of chemical interactions amongst our own cells, but also the complexity of all the other microorganisms that grow in and on us and how they interact with us, compounded by environmental signals, and perhaps most importantly our own thoughts and beliefs about health and disease and the thoughts and beliefs and communications of our healers, friends, family and broader societal networks.

The placebo effect is usually looked down upon as being a minor element in healing - only applicable to symptom management.

The truth is the placebo effect sometimes seems to be the only effect and far from being minor I would argue it can completely heal disease leading to miraculous seeming remissions, and on the other hand the opposite “nocebo” effect can actually create disease and even kill people.

Quite tellingly the scientific discourse on the placebo effect bypasses any discussion of spontaneous remissions.

What is going on with all the people who spontaneously recover from all manner of chronic conditions like cancer, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s, Inflammatory Bowel Disease, Diabetes, Seizures, Migraines, Asthma, Allergies, etc? 

These recoveries are not the rule, but they are not that exceptional either.

Many chronic conditions are termed relapsing and remitting disorders: or some hand waving reason that is not well defined many disorders tend to spontaneously relapse and remit.

But there are also many documented cases of spontaneous remissions unfollowed by a relapse that occur in disorders that are not at all typically associated with them.

It’s laziness to brush this off as simply misdiagnosis.

The terms we use also color our perception - in a past time sudden healing or worsening would have been referred to in hushed tones as being due to magic or miracle.

Now we use clinical sounding terminology like placebo, nocebo, spontaneous remission, sudden death, etc.

These terms make it seem as though we know exactly what is going on, even when we don’t.

Sure there is a lot of science that’s been done on the placebo and nocebo effects that has elucidated to some extent how they work for select conditions like pain control, anxiety relief, and Parkinson’s disease, but there are also mysteries remaining like what’s going on during spontaneous cancer remissions, or when patients know they are taking a placebo yet it still works, or with placebo induced cognitive enhancement, or with the social network effects seen in obesity, depression, suicide, gender dysphoria and pandemic infectious diseases like HIV, influenza and COVID-19.

The no virus crowd often points to studies showing that infectious diseases have not been transmitted with infectious secretions in a lab setting. I haven’t done a thorough literature review on this, but it seems quite remarkable on the face of it. One frequently cited army study had influenza infected soldiers deliberately coughing into the mouths of healthy participants, and yet they were unable to transmit the infection. 

How much does expectation and belief play a role in the transmission and symptomatology of pandemics?

An interesting comment on a Twitter space from a South African ER doc treating COVID-19 patients with off label protocols: he noted that he could predict who would live and who would die simply based on how afraid the patient was.

The people he could get through to and reassure made it out fine, and those who were convinced they were dead, ended up dead in short order.

There is a famous story told of an Indian prisoner in the early 1900s who was offered the choice of death by hanging or by an experimental painless bleeding procedure.

He was taken blindfolded to a room where he was restrained on a table and superficial incisions were made to his limbs, which soon clotted off stopping further bleeding.

But at the same time bags of water placed near his limbs were slowly emptied into basins on the floor to mimic the sound of blood draining out.

The people present in the room conspired to gradually lower their voices then eventually stop speaking altogether - as if the prisoner was becoming less capable of hearing them, and the flow of water was gradually reduced to a dripping and then finally stopped altogether.

The prisoner died when the water stopped dripping - having completely bought into the sham that his blood had been thoroughly drained out, even though not a drop had left him - he convinced himself to death.

There are actually many accounts of sudden death that can be broken down into different categories. 

People have seemingly died of fright, despair, broken hearts, excitement, intense pleasure, when they were just finally ready to go, and even when they saw that their loved ones were finally ready to let them go.

If our beliefs can kill us, and we live in a world where spontaneous remissions, faith healings, miracles, or whatever you want to call them, do happen, then maybe we should spend a lot more time thinking about what we believe about our health and the stories we tell ourselves about what leads to healing. 

Because what we believe obviously influences our physical reality.

Is it really the virus or the vaccine that makes you sick or kills you, or is it your expectations of the virus and vaccine?

I’m not suggesting that cause and effect doesn’t exist, or claiming that medications or pathogens have no positive or negative effects of their own. 

What I am saying is that the greatest proximate cause of all has been ignored for far too long: you yourself. 

So it’s a combination of both, but at least you have some control over what you believe, whereas you have no control over whether you test positive for a particular pathogen, or whether some past version of you was convinced or coerced to get injected.

If you choose to edit your experience and your own thoughts and choose to convince yourself one way or another that you can be healthy again despite having been exposed to the spike protein, or the mRNA, or lipid nanoparticles or whatever bogeyman now haunts you, then you can be healthy again.

Avoid the fear mongers and especially the most intelligent of them who can spin the most sciencey sounding stories for why humanity will never recover from this - we can and will recover as long as we don’t give in to the nocebo armies prowling around on social media and in the medical journals.

Belief is a choice, but it's not as simple as reading an article, it’s an ongoing process that depends on the narratives and people you choose to expose yourself to. 

Look for people who believe in the power of natural healing and lifestyle medicine, and look for stories of those who have healed. 

Avoid negativity like the plague, especially when it comes with a (pseudo) scientific veneer. 

In her book Radical Remission, Dr Kelly Turner studies those whose cancers disappeared and identified 9 key factors:

1. Changing diet

2. Taking control of health

3. Following intuition

4. Using herbs and supplements

5. Releasing suppressed emotions

6. Increasing positive emotions

7. Embracing social support

8. Deepening spiritual connection

9. Having strong reasons for living

If you want to learn more about what works for Long COVID & Vax injuries go here and check out a protocol that includes lifestyle, supplements, meds and suggested labs. 

Sign up, watch the video and read the document which outlines the approach:

Then I highly recommend taking it a step further and registering here to read a free ebook on lifestyle medicine for Long Haul along with wathcing a series of 4 webinars and a series of daily emails that comprise a short course of sorts encouraging you to make simple baby step changes. 

Going a step further you can register for a 2 month lifestyle course that has proven to help people actually make the changes they learn about.

The best way to take it is in a group with others so you can benefit from the positive network effects as they struggle through the same issues and start making beneficial changes that will rub off on you.

Education really is the most important component of healing - the purpose of education is not simply to know more, but to gradually convince yourself of a new paradigm of health and healing and to make it easier to change.

Take your time, it doesn’t work if you just read through everything in a day.

Deeply held beliefs don’t usually shift overnight. For real healing to happen you have to get under the surface and reach the inner core of your being.

And if you find that this approach doesn’t speak to you, then go find another: keep searching until you find a healer that convinces you they can get you better, whether it’s with acupuncture or herbs, homeopathy or laying on of hands, energy amulets or chanting under the moonlight.

There are charlatans in every field, but most purveyors of these and other outlandish methods actually believe in them quite deeply and someone else’s strongly held belief can affect you just as much as your own belief can.

Some people consider this something akin to hypnotic suggestion, but whatever it is there are documented healers throughout history and in every culture who have effected cures of the incurable.

As long as the suggested therapy isn’t outright dangerous who are we to scoff when we barely understand what our own medicine is doing or how and why it works in some and harms in others?