In his award-winning book on epigenetics, The Genie in Your Genes, Dawson Church discusses several studies on the placebo effect. This remarkable phenomenon is one of the strongest examples of the impressive power your mind wields over your physical health, and to understand how it works is to begin to understand the vast potential of epigenetics to revolutionize your health and the entire field of medicine.
A placebo is essentially a “fake” treatment with an inactive substance like sugar, saline solution, or distilled water which has absolutely no real medicinal properties. Yet, in some cases, the condition of the patient taking a placebo will improve simply because the person expects that the treatment will be helpful. Remember, placebos have absolutely no actual impact on your health, so when the person experiences improvement, the only explanation is that their mind is responsible for the change in their health status. The healing caused by your mind is the placebo effect, and it’s a very important illustration of how your belief can change your health.
According to Church, placebos work in about 35 percent of documented cases. For a drug to be considered effective, it has to work significantly better than the placebo. It may surprise you to know, however, that in efficacy testing, fewer drugs than expected are able to rise to that challenge.
For instance, a recent trial of anti-depressant treatments compared the effects of three substances: St. John’s Wort (a popular herbal option); Zoloft (one of the most frequently prescribed antidepressant medications); and a placebo. At the conclusion of the trial, St. John’s Wort worked for 24 percent of the participants who took it. Zoloft performed better, but only slightly; it worked for 25 percent of the participants. And the star of the study? The placebo; it worked for a whopping 32 percent of those who took it.
The results of two large-scale studies of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs), a top choice for pharmaceutical treatment of depression, anxiety, and some personality disorders, showed equally unimpressive results. Released by the United States federal government in 2006, the findings from the tests “failed to show that the drugs were safer or more effective than a placebo.”
There’s good evidence that reported benefits of many currently prescribed drugs are actually due to the placebo effect. Dr. Irving Kristol, PhD, a psychologist at the University of Connecticut, claims an astronomical percentage of the entire effect of anti - depressants stems from the placebo effect. After analyzing the results of drug studies for depression, Dr. Kristol determined that three-quarters of the improvements patients experience from drugs like Zoloft and Prozac came from the patient’s belief that the drugs would be effective, rather than from the effects of the drugs themselves. As for the remainder, it was hard to tell, since
the drugs produce recognizable physical symptoms (for example, side effects such as dry mouth) that may alert participants to the fact that they are taking a “real” drug rather than a placebo, which may strengthen their belief that the substance would be effective.
Dr. Kristol later conducted a meta-analysis of 47 studies of antidepressants from the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) database, and found that “an average of 80 percent of the effect of the drugs was due to the placebo effect.” Only 40 percent of the studies he analyzed showed that the drug had a marginally better cure rate than the placebo.
These so-called “file drawer studies” are never published or submitted to the FDA. Drug companies go to great lengths to hide them, and the reason they do so is hardly surprising. If patients knew that the real secret behind their improvement wasn’t a chemical cocktail—one that often entails nasty side effects—but rather their own mental strength and positive beliefs, the multi- billion dollar pharmaceutical industry would start losing customers fast. And that, of course, would threaten the astronomical profits of one of the most outrageously lucrative markets in the modern world.
Nonetheless, there is something greater than profit that can be garnered from the science behind the placebo effect. Enter - prising researchers are now conducting experiments to determine how to harness the power of belief. Researchers from the Institute of HeartMath in Boulder Creek, Colorado, performed a series of experiments on the effect of intention and emotion on human DNA. Dr. Rollin McCraty, PhD, led the HeartMath team, which documented measurable molecular changes to DNA molecules caused by desires, intentions, and emotions.
molecules required for healing,” the team reported. “Our brains are themselves generating drugs similar to those that our doctor is prescribing for us.” Of course, we must consider that many drugs may be effective only because we ourselves will them to be so. However, the power of the mind heals with no known side effects. In that light, it seems fair to say that the “drugs” generated by our brains are not only similar to the drugs doctors prescribe, but actually far superior to those drugs.