by Dr.Harald Wiesendanger– Klartext
What the mainstream media is hiding
Do my Ways Out Charity’s therapy camps only help those who believe in the effectiveness of the treatments offered? Are patients there being duped with pseudomedicine? Do they fall for placebos? Like a prayer wheel, skeptics against unconventional methods of healing use the “Placebo Argument” – and are wrong for several reasons.
When you talk about your experiences at our camps at home, be prepared for two reactions: “Impossible! I don’t think so!” or “It’s all placebo!”
With one, you will be accused of lying; with the other, you will be portrayed as naive.
You will let your first reaction, indignant or calm, bounce off you: after all, no one knows better than you what you have experienced.
The second, on the other hand, could make you doubt afterward. It is based on an argument in which skeptics see the sharpest sword that can be wielded against “alternative” healing methods. It says: The mere belief that a treatment works is enough to produce effects – patients who think they will benefit from unscientific therapies succumb to this “placebo effect.” Did you let us seduce you into falling for this?
The starting point for this argument is a fascinating phenomenon in which medical research began to take an interest at the end of the 1940s. Since then, it has been impressively confirmed in hundreds of studies: medicines without any pharmacologically active ingredients – be it a sugar pill or a syringe that only contains saline solution – can not only improve subjective well-being but also alleviate or even eliminate a wide variety of physical symptoms, provided that The patient takes it in the belief that he has received a real medication, a so-called verum.
All that is required is that they look and taste and are administered like an ordinary preparation. Placebo injections have a stronger effect than capsules; capsules have a stronger effect than tablets – even if they contain exactly the same substances in identical doses; red, orange, or pink colored pills are more effective than blue or multicolored ones, white more effective than brown ones; bitter ones work better than those that taste like nothing; A larger number of pills is more effective than a few or even a single one. Placebos work better if they supposedly come from abroad; if their name borrows from time-honored Latin or Greek and includes auspicious increments such as “forte” or “plus”; if they have a brand name; if you don’t get it for free but have to pay for it.
The effect is increased when the placebo is given by someone whose authority the patient recognizes – a doctor, not just a nurse.
Such “placebos” – literally “I will please,” meaning “I will do good,” from the Latin placere (1) – lower the blood sugar level in two out of three people with diabetes. For bedwetting patients, they usually work just as well as the usual medications. They significantly alleviate the symptoms in over 70 percent of all patients with stomach ulcers, as well as in four out of five arthritis sufferers. Three out of four patients with severe wound pain respond to morphine – but a placebo equally helps one in three. Test subjects also respond to placebos with migraines, asthma, bronchitis, motion sickness, indigestion, impotence, skin diseases, high blood pressure, Parkinson’s disease, angina pectoris, and dozens of other serious diagnoses.
This effect was even evident during operations: when patients were simulated to undergo an operation – for example, a knee arthroscopy or a so-called ligature, in which heart surgeons tie off an artery in the chest wall – they felt as much better afterward as if they had undergone a real operation. (2)
It follows from this that you could benefit health-wise from our camps even if you would experience nothing more than pseudomedicine there, used by charlatans who are excellent at inspiring trust. So, have we given you nothing more than placebos: fake medications without any therapeutic agent that only help as long as you are convinced of their effectiveness?
Put sand in the prayer wheel ten times.
Repeated over and over again for decades, the “placebo argument” is actually a poor rhetorical move for at least a dozen reasons, a few of which you should always have ready when talking to skeptics; Short versions of ten of them follow immediately.3 Let us take spiritual healing as an example, which is used particularly intensively in “way out” camps:
1. If spiritual healing were simply a placebo, then the more strongly a patient believes in its effect, the better it would work. Healers sometimes also help suspicious people, even outright skeptics. On the other hand, many open-minded patients, some of whom have already become esoteric converts and are firmly convinced of its benefits, wait in vain for a miracle.
2. Spiritual healings sometimes succeed under circumstances that rule out placebo effects from the outset:
– in the case of remote treatments that the person being treated could not have known about, for example, because they were unconscious or because he lacked the cognitive ability to hold beliefs about the effects of therapy: an infant, for example, a severely mentally handicapped person, or an accident victim in a coma.
– in so-called “double-blind studies,” i.e., studies in which both the test subjects and the doctors and scientists involved are left in the dark as to who is being treated mentally and who is not – which eliminates expectation effects;
– in experiments with non-human test subjects that we would hardly trust to be susceptible to placebo effects: for example, with lower animals, plants, fungi, bacteria, isolated cells and cell components, enzymes, and DNA, even with crystals, water samples, and other inorganic things Material. They often responded measurably when spiritual healers tried to influence them. (4)
3. After spiritual healing has begun, further medical history often takes a course that the “placebo argument” alone can hardly explain. If strong faith alone were the deciding factor, it would be expected that a patient would improve slowly but steadily; recovery would have to progress continuously. Quite often, however, a phenomenon occurs that is diametrically opposed to the patient’s expectations and hopes, at least initially: the healer has barely started working with him when the symptoms temporarily worsen, and new complaints appear: pain, vomiting, Diarrhea, fever and other severe reactions may occur. They surprise and frighten many people being treated because they seem to indicate a relapse. Strangely enough, they often indicate that the treatment is working. Experience has shown that the likelihood of benefiting from spiritual healing increases significantly after such crises have occurred and been overcome. This is reminiscent of a process that is familiar to homeopaths: the so-called “initial aggravation” after taking a preparation, which often precedes healing.
4. If “mental” healing successes were solely due to suggestions and placebo effects, then fake treatments would have to be just as effective as real ones. So if I just pretend that I’m “transferring healing energy” to a sick person, while in reality, I’m thinking about something completely different – for example, as happened in a US study, counting back from 100 to zero – then I would have to do the same achieve a lot, like when I concentrate fully on healing. However, the few studies that have investigated this suspicion indicate that concentrated spiritual healing helps significantly better.
5. About two-thirds of all patients with whom healers work at a distance report strange physical sensations at the exact time when a distance treatment takes place: e.g., an intense tingling sensation, warmth or cold, a feeling of being flowed through, of floating, of sudden inner feelings Calmness, or being under power. Critics fundamentally interpret this phenomenon as the result of autosuggestion and as a side effect of a placebo reaction: After all, the patient usually knows when he is being treated remotely – so he tells himself in good time that healing energy streams are reaching him from a distance and feels accordingly. But that in no way explains two phenomena that sometimes occur in distance healing:
– It can happen that a healer misses the agreed distance treatment – whether something comes up or he simply forgets the appointment. Sometimes, he subsequently receives complaints from the affected patients, who feel that they have not been worked with because the usual characteristic sensations are missing at this time.
– It can also happen that a healer is delayed by a few minutes or even hours with the remote treatment – and accordingly, later, his patient sometimes experiences mysterious sensations, even though he initially knows nothing about the delay. How is this possible if all of a patient’s reactions to spiritual healing are purely faith-based?
6. If spiritual healing were a placebo, then remote treatments, i.e., spiritual healing attempts in the absence of the patient, would fundamentally have a weaker effect than other forms of spiritual healing in which the healer and the person seeking help have direct contact with one another. The physical presence of a sick person makes it considerably easier for the healer to strengthen belief in his abilities: through his entire demeanor, his charisma, his persuasiveness in verbal exchanges, through more or less obvious suggestions, and through the special furnishings and atmosphere of the treatment room. But surprisingly, some healers have better results at distance healing. The reason for this phenomenon is almost always the same: when treating at a distance, it is said, the healer and patient can concentrate entirely on their encounter on an “energetic” level without being distracted by irrelevant perceptions, assessments, and emotions that they inevitably trigger in one another as soon as they sit opposite each other.
7. Even if spiritual healing could only achieve placebo effects, it would by no means follow that it is inferior to medical measures and, therefore, represents an inferior form of therapy. There is a misconception among many doctors that placebo reactions are generally milder and weaker than the “objective” effects of a “real” therapy – but research shows that they are not.
8. Among doctors, the proverbial “demigods in white,” charismatic personalities with great suggestive charisma and an aura of omniscience and infallibility are certainly no less common than among spiritual healers. On the contrary, their academic title, education, linguistic fluency, and the furnishings and ambiance of their workplace give them a considerable advantage in authority. 72 percent of the German population still consider doctors to be among the five professions for which they have “the most respect,” In contrast, no other professional group achieves a prestige value above 45 percent – not even clergy, lawyers, and university professors.5 Should be in doctor’s practices and Wouldn’t incredible “healing miracles” occur much more often in clinics if all that was necessary was to strengthen the trust and confidence of sick people? After all, patients of doctors believe and hope no less strongly than patients of healers. Why don’t unexpected recoveries happen to them much more often if all that was needed was a placebo reaction?
9. If a long-term patient whom no doctor could help gets rid of a supposedly incurable illness after a few healing sessions, he doesn’t really care whether it’s a “placebo effect” or a “psi effect” that’s responsible; the man in the Moon or Rumpelstiltskin. The main thing is to be healthy.
The placebo response: not a nuisance, but a blessing
10. The fact that spiritual healers are being tricked by doctors using the “placebo argument” is basically a bad joke. In reality, placebo effects can never be ruled out in all forms of healing, including those recognized by conventional medicine, “scientifically” proven and generally practiced. Experts estimate that 30 to 60 percent of the effect of all medical measures can be attributed to the placebo effect; psychologist Hans-Jürgen Eyenck even provocatively assumed a 99 percent share. (6) If the taking of a medicine nevertheless results in improvement, it is less thanks to any highly potent pharmacological ingredients than to the positive expectations of the patients, who take them in good spirits, and of their doctors, who confidently prescribe them – and in the process unconsciously administer placebos. (7) The “drug doctor” also plays a role in every conventional medical therapy.
In this context, it is worth taking a look back at the history of medicine. Until a few decades ago, most medications prescribed by doctors were pharmacologically inactive, if not harmful, as we now know. In the 17th century, a widely circulated London pharmacopeia recommended such adventurous remedies as flayed snake skins, ground scorpions, swallows’ nests, fox lungs, the saliva of fasting people, placenta, and moss from the rotting skulls of hanged men. (8th)
A hundred years later, the French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778) scoffed: “Doctors put medicines about which they know little, into human bodies about which they know even less, to treat diseases, French writer and philosopher Voltaire (1694-1778). 1778): “Doctors put medicines about which they know little, into human bodies about which they know even less, to treat diseases about which they know nothing at all.”
In 1860, the American writer Oliver Holmes wrote an ironic thought experiment: If most of the medicines used at the time were “sunk to the bottom of the sea, that would be all the better for humanity and all the more fatal for the fish.” (9)
Generations of doctors have largely used placebos or worse without realizing it, and as such, “the history of medical treatment until relatively recent times is the history of the placebo effect,” as American psychiatrist and medical historian A. Shapiro notes. (10) However, although they unknowingly relied on placebos, the medical profession still maintained its reputation and reputation as a successful healing profession, from which it can be concluded that the remedies of their choice were, on the whole, effective.
Has anything really changed since then? There is a lot of money to be made from therapeutic illusions on the pharmaceutical market, among other places. In Germany alone, billions in profits are made with pharmaceuticals, the only guaranteed effect of which is the movement of the sales accounts of around 850 manufacturers. Over 250 million times a year, doctors in this country prescribe medications whose clinical evidence of effectiveness is at least controversial, if not completely absent; this corresponds to 34 percent of the entire German pharmaceutical market. As even the Federal Ministry of Health admits, thousands of medicines are sold in Germany for which “no therapeutic benefit has been proven” (11) – more than a third of the over 8,000 medicines on offer, which are available in five times as many dosage forms and potencies on the market are.
Expensive mass placebos are suspected of being drugs that promote blood circulation, which older people, in particular, take in the hope of improving perception and memory.
Significant therapeutic effects are also doubted about biliary tract medications, as are liver protection preparations, which would largely make strict abstinence from alcohol anyway, in slimming products, with antidepressants, for the majority of urological medications.
And there is still no convincing clinical evidence that rheumatism ointments are significantly superior to hot water bottles, that vein remedies relieve varicose veins and prevent thrombosis, or that drops against cataracts, so-called “anti-cataracts” can make eye surgery unnecessary.
Probably every third medication that we can buy in pharmacies actually has no specific effect on the symptoms for which it is prescribed. If it does help, it is less thanks to any chemical ingredients than to the positive expectations of the patients who swallow it happily and their doctors who confidently prescribe it.
And isn’t the placebo effect lurking everywhere in every doctor’s consultation? Nothing promotes trust more than social prestige – and no profession enjoys greater prestige in Germany than that of being a doctor. Patients, therefore, have great respect for their doctor and trust him. They are impressed by his title and jargon but also by his silence; They attach meaning to every frown, throat clearing, and silent nod of the head. They are reassured when the doctor describes their complaints using diagnostic Latin and seems to know precisely what is wrong with them. You experience how respectful and submissive his support staff looks up to him. They marvel at the specialist literature on his bookshelves and all the technical devices around him that he handles so confidently. All of this immensely promotes the patient’s expectation of being cured – it is, therefore, a “placebo.”
This is in no way intended to devalue what doctors do; on the contrary. Triggering beneficial placebo reactions in patients is a delicate medical art that is undeservedly suspected.
The fact that such reactions occur at all should arouse enthusiastic attention among medical researchers and all those working in the medical profession. Instead, in conventional medicine, they are widely viewed as a nuisance that needs to be filtered out and eliminated if the value of a therapeutic measure is to be assessed. For many doctors, placebos have something disreputable, hypocritical, and dubious about them; Their use appears to be based on tricks and deception and thus amounts to Quackery. Until the 18th century, “placebo” had the most contemptible meaning of a flatterer, sweet-talker, sycophant, and scrounger. (12)
For this reason, some doctors never administer placebo preparations for ethical reasons. Such “fake” remedies are treated condescendingly like an antediluvian prop to be ashamed of. Placebo effects are also considered “false”: if, for example, pain patients feel better after taking a placebo, this reaction, which is welcome in itself, is usually interpreted as an indication that the pain had no physiological basis, i.e., was “merely imagined”. Already in a medical dictionary from 1811, “placebo” was defined disparagingly as “the term for any medicine that is more likely to satisfy a patient than to benefit him.” (13)
But why shouldn’t it be allowed to be helpful by satisfying?
In reality, everyone responds to placebos, both inside and outside of the established medical establishment, as long as they are given them under conditions that strengthen their belief in them. And that’s a good thing: The power of faith to awaken self-healing powers is a largely underestimated therapeutic factor. Recognizing and using them instead of trying to eliminate them as something “unreal” would not only make human medicine more effective but ultimately more humane.
The illusion of having to exclude placebo reactions can only succumb to those who consider the mind to be unreal or deny it any connection to the body – viewing it as a “ghost in the machine,” as the English philosopher Gilbert Ryle once remarked. In contrast, the successes of healers also show how intimately mind and body interpenetrate in ways that a young branch of science, psychoneuroimmunology, is only just beginning to trace. “As a medical practitioner,” explains the American medical philosopher Andrew Weil, “I have no interest in eliminating a placebo reaction in my patients. Using placebos that release the inner healing powers through a psychic mechanism is not Quackery or deception, but psychosomatic medicine at its best – simply good medicine, regardless of the standard.” (14)
In this respect, healers are often better doctors. It’s good that you trusted them with us.
(Harald Wiesendanger)
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Remarks
1 The term placebo first appeared in Christian liturgy. In the 12th century, the verse Placebo domino in regione vivorum (Psalm 116:9) – “I will please the Lord in the land of the living” – found its way into the devotion to the dead. In the 14th century, “placebo” referred to the lament of a funeral choir. It was only in the 18th century that doctors began to use the word “placebo” in its current meaning.
2 s. Distance Healing, Volume 2: Case studies, research, objections, explanations. Schönbrunn 2004, p. 81 f. and the sources cited there
3 I have dealt in detail with the placebo argument, which I will only briefly address here, in several books; A detailed criticism, references to scientific studies and sources can be found in Harald Wiesendanger: Fernheilen, Volume 2, a.a.O., pp. 65-86; Spiritual Healer – The Guide, Schönbrunn 5th edition 2007, pp. 104-118; The Great Book of Spiritual Healing, Schönbrunn 4th edition 2000, pp. 228-238.
4 I summarize the state of research in Distance Healing, Volume 2, ibid. The most detailed overview of controlled studies since the 1950s is offered by the American doctor and healer Daniel Benor: Healing Research, Vol. 1, Munich 1992.
5 Institute for Demoscopy Allensbach (2003); It was 75 percent in a survey by the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy in January 1999 among 2,131 Germans aged 16 and over, published in Allensbacher Reports 4/1999.
6 Remarks at a congress on suggestibility, Giessen, July 1987.
7 See D. M. Dunlop/T. L. Henderson/R. S. Inch, “Survey of 17 301 prescriptions of form EC10”, British Medical Journal 1952, pp. 292-295
8 According to Geo 10/2003, p. 55f.
9 Quoted from A. K. Shapiro: “The placebo effect in the history of medical treatment: Implications for psychiatry,” American Journal of Psychiatry 116/1959, pp. 298-304, their p. 301.
10 Shapiro, ibid., p. 303.
11 Nach Welt am Sonntag No. 10 / March 8, 1998, p. 14: “16,000 medicines without proof of benefit”.
12 See Rupert Sheldrake: Seven experiments that could change the world – a do-it-yourself guide to revolutionary science, New York 1995, chapter 7, section “The Placebo Effect.”
13 Hooper’s Medical Dictionary, quoted in B. Roueché, “Placebo,” in this: A Man Named Hoffman and Other Narratives of Medical Detection, Boston 1965, p. 92.
14 Andrew Weil: Healing and self-healing. About conventional and alternative medicine. Weinheim 1988, p. 261.
This amount comes from Harald Wiesendanger’s book Ways Out – Helping the Sick Differently (2015).