The placebo effect is a wonderful discovery of my later life, a true eye opener for me. It is not that I didn’t know of this powerful phenomenon, it is more I didn’t understand its full significance, I didn’t quite register it as a thing. Delving more and more into the mind-body connection, I now have a profound respect for this notion, known to medics and practitioners for millennia and a very meaningful insight into the nature of reality for me.
It is common knowledge that emotional and psychological states have a formidable effect on the way the body reacts to stress, pain and disease. Change your psychology, the cocktail of hormones and neurotransmitters which, in simplistic terms, produces our physiological state of consciousness and the body will follow. Less worry means the parasympathetic nervous system can support the rest-digest-repair functions of the organism. If parasympathetic activity dominates, healing and regeneration happens.
As Tony Robbins puts it: “When you are grateful, fear disappears and abundance appears.” There is no room for negative self-talk in a heart that’s filled with gratitude. No ailment in someone who feels the kind and loving vibe of others, the bening support of a remedy, the soothing nature of a smile.
Don’t worry, you’ll be alright, everything is going to be OK. Mum takes you in her arms for a long hug which dries all tears, soothes the soul. Everyone is familiar with the feeling of being cared for, particularly as children, the softly spoken words of reassurance uttered by a parent, reinforced by physical proximity, the scent and warmth of a true connection.
Emotional states of fear and desire, lacking and wanting are harnessed by clever advertisers, marketers and politicians. The power of placebo is well known by science, being a key component of clinical trials. Did you know that the colour and size of a pill can alter the strength of its placebo effect? Placebo is always at play, but seen in negative terms in a mechanistic, reductionist, pharmaceutical view of healthcare.
Rituals are a wonderful component of the way we interact with each other, perceive reality, the way we live life. Anthropologists have long studied social rituals as a way of understanding what a group of people believes and what they value. Rites of passage, initiations and various other social forms might seem to be less relevant today but, actually, they are very much at the core of everything we do.
The English ritual of going to the pub on a Friday after work is known to help social bonding among colleagues. Bringing gifts to people for Christmas, attending stag or hen nights, weddings, funerals and housewarmings, even simple small talk when meeting strangers fall into the realm of rituals.
Rituals bring social flow and connection at conscious and subconscious levels. Break an established ritual and you might be perceived as rude, unfriendly, unattractive. We all have embedded expectations and personal beliefs we want to be honoured, we live in a culture, for the good and bad of it.
Rituals are hidden, rooted in much of the political and social narrative coming from the media. According to James Carey: “news reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one”. Someone could argue the current media narrative is filled with placebos, and much more nocebos, not just in the pharmaceutical sense of the word. Fear mongering works very powerfully on our psyche, think how control and compliance were obtained through authoritarian ideologies and the irrational fear of hell or purgatory in medieval Europe.
In broader terms, if you have negative expectations about a particular action, person, treatment or outcome, you have more chances this projected reality will manifest.
Is much of what we perceive as real, actually a manufactured, culturally determined, placebo/nocebo conditioned experience?
I see the power of inducing a higher state of connection and wellbeing in Koh Phangan. We love rituals here, creating and harmonising a shared energy, an inclusive experience in cacao ceremonies, during ecstatic dance or sound healing. As a Yoga teacher, I apply the power of an ancient ritual which brings people in unison into various physical postures that resonate with aspects of the body and mind. A Yoga class is much more than physical activity, as it induces a change of consciousness, it brings people energetically together.
This explains it so well, I just need to paste it from the source: “The healer provides the sufferer with imaginative, emotional, sensory, moral and aesthetic input derived from the palpable symbols and procedures of the ritual process-in the process fusing the sufferer’s idiosyncratic narrative unto a universal cultural mythos. Healing rituals involve a drama of evocation, enactment, embodiment and evaluation in a charged atmosphere of hope and uncertainty.
Experimental research into placebo effects demonstrates that routine biomedical pharmacological and procedural interventions contain significant ritual dimensions. This research also suggests that ritual healing not only represents changes in affect, self-awareness and self-appraisal of behavioural capacities, but involves modulations of symptoms through neurobiological mechanisms.”
What’s your view of homeopathy? Whatever you might think of it, homeopathy works for many people.
We as human beings love stories and were brought up immersed in ancient and modern mythology, with archetypal characters playing a cultural narrative. This human characteristic can be harnessed to our own individual advantage, to establish a healthy routine, a sef-loving narrative, a quicker recovery from setbacks.
Do you know that chronic back pain has a huge emotional component? I read this book from Dr Sarno which I really recommend if you are suffering with back pain.
“Engaging in the ritual of healthy living, eating right, exercising, yoga, quality social time, meditating, probably provides some of the key ingredients of a placebo effect,” says Professor Ted Kaptchuk see here.
The placebo effect is a phenomenon I needed to fully understand to more closely grasp the nature of reality. I am now trying to see it manifested in everyday life, trying to use placebo rituals on myself for more joy and well-being. The simple act of taking a shower could be part of a ritual of cleansing, cooking and eating food with awareness might contain a placebo element.
Am I a negative, critical force of worries to people and myself or can I lift someone’s moment and my own mood with an act of gentleness and warmth, a positive word, a big smile?