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"The third example can be accounted for as the mind's effect on the biochemistry of the body or by the placebo effect, which involves realizing a deeply held intention or expectation. However, again we are back to asking what the mind is. If it is so powerful that it can change the state of our body and mimic the effects of pharmaceuticals, then why has medicine ignored this natural healing capability for so long, dismissing it derisively as the placebo effect, and why isn't there a Manhattan Project of health care to explore and harness it?" - Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey, Decoding the Human Body-Field: The New Science of Information as Medicine (Get the book.)

"In fact, across the board, the placebo effect works better than prescription drugs, especially when you consider that most drugs work on far fewer than 30 percent of patients. Yet, conventional medicine dismisses the placebo effect as pseudo-scientific quackery— even as their own studies prove its consistent efficacy across literally tens of thousands of studies. No drug, surgery, or conventional medical treatment has ever been tested as extensively as the placebo effect, and this mind-body phenomenon proves itself again and again." - Mike Adams, Natural Health Solutions (Get the book.)

"The problem is the "placebo effect," the ability of placebos to make people feel better, a mysterious but common occurrence in medicine. In the case of depressed children and teenagers, the placebo effect is particularly strong: As many as half of kids in clinical trials get better on placebos. The other confounding factor here is the fact that not everybody responds in the same way to an SSRI. Studies in healthy volunteers, people who have no signs or symptoms of depression, have found that some people feel terrific, even better than well, on an antidepressant. Many feel little or nothing." - Shannon Brownlee, Overtreated: Why Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer (Get the book.)

"And then there is the placebo effect, which has always bedeviled nutrition research. About a third of Americans are what researchers call responders—people who will respond to a treatment or intervention regardless of whether they've actually received it. When testing a drug you can correct for this by using a placebo in your trial, but how do you correct for the placebo effect in the case of a dietary trial? You can't: Low-fat foods seldom taste like the real thing, and no person is ever going to confuse a meat entree for a vegetarian substitute." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.)

"You want to enhance the placebo effect under some circumstances," he says. "And in some others, you want to reduce it—like when you do a clinical trial." . - The Creighton University Web site pro-— vides more information about the placebo effect at http://altmed.creighton.edu/homeo pathy. Click on "Placebo Effect." Quick Pain Relief Tricks When you're in pain, it's hard to think of anything else. But redirecting your thoughts can be helpful. Following are some other techniques to try... •Instruct yourself to think and behave in a functional way." - Bottom Line Health, Bottom Line's Health Breakthroughs 2007 (Get the book.)

"However, medical science became confused when they observed in their own testing of drugs the placebo effect. The placebo effect, as described by medical science, is when you give a patient nothing, yet they believe they are getting a powerful drug and therefore their illness is cured. There is absolutely no explanation except that the patient's "belief" or "thoughts" actually cured the disease. This placebo effect is not questioned in the medical community; it is factual, documented, and known to be true." - Kevin Trudeau, More Natural Cures Revealed: Previously Censored Brand Name Products That Cure Disease (Get the book.)

"These are the insights that will lead us to understand things such as the placebo effect and will explain why a man's belief about something that happened 2,000 years ago can manifest as the wounds on his body today. It's often said that what we hold to be true of our world may be more important than what really exists. The reason? If we believe something clearly enough, our subconscious will transform our belief into the reality that we believed to begin with! In other words, it appears that the adage is true: "We'll see it when we believe it." - Gregg Braden, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (Get the book.)

"But at least an equal number have either shown no effect or an effect that was not significantly greater than the placebo effect. Herein lies one of the curiosities of medicine, elegantly portrayed with PMS: why do conventional scientific studies fail to demonstrate success with many of these natural therapies that women consistently rely on for successful monthly treatments? Perhaps the answer is as simple as that statistically significant is not the same as clinically relevant: what works for one person is different than what works for another." - Tori Hudson, N.D., Women's Encyclopedia of Natural Medicine: Alternative Therapies and Integrative Medicine for Total Health and Wellness (Get the book.)

"I believe a wiser attitude to take toward the power of belief and faith is not to belittle it as merely a placebo effect. Rather, I think that a large part of transforming depression has to do with faith and belief. The good news is that today some doctors have adopted a new attitude toward faith, belief, and the placebo effect. They've come to realize that this phenomenon is so powerful that it can make all the difference with mental suffering and even in some cases of severe physical illness. Many intelligent depressed people are not so wise when it comes to the issue of faith and belief." - Bruce E. Levine, Surviving America's Depression Epidemic: How to Find Morale, Energy, and Community in a World Gone Crazy (Get the book.)

"When testing a drug you can correct for this by using a placebo in your trial, but how do you correct for the placebo effect in the case of a dietary trial? You can't: Low-fat foods seldom taste like the real thing, and no person is ever going to confuse a meat entree for a vegetarian substitute. Marion Nestle also cautions against taking the diet out of the context of the lifestyle, a particular hazard when comparing the diets of different populations." - Michael Pollan, In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto (Get the book.)

"The term used to describe this phenomenon was the placebo response—or, as it is more commonly known, the placebo effect. The Latin word placebo was used in early Christian traditions as part of the ritual reading of Psalms 116:9. This passage begins with the words Placebo Domino in regione vivorum, which mean "I shall please the Lord in the land of the living."5 Although there's some controversy regarding the Latin and the original Hebrew translation of the same phrase, the word placebo itself is unaffected and generally translated as "I will/shall please." - Gregg Braden, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (Get the book.) "While research on the placebo effect may not be as compelling to look at as a Christian cross emblazoned across a man's forehead, this is precisely what those and similar studies are telling us. When we believe that something is true, our belief combines with other forces in the field of Planck's matrix to give instructions to the body that make it come true. Sometimes the effects are visible in the physical world beyond our bodies, as we saw in the peace experiment in the Middle East. Or, in the case of stigmata, they're mirrored within the body that's having the feelings." - Gregg Braden, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (Get the book.) "If this is true, then the placebo effect may actually account for a large percentage of past healings and may have played a key role in helping humankind survive into modern times. If life-affirming beliefs do in fact have the power to reverse disease and heal our bodies, then we must ask ourselves an obvious question: How much damage do negative beliefs carry? How does the way we think about our age, for example, actually affect the way we grow older? What are the consequences of being bombarded with media messages that tell us we're sick rather than ones that celebrate our health?" - Gregg Braden, The Spontaneous Healing of Belief: Shattering the Paradigm of False Limits (Get the book.)

"In practice it is difficult to know if reported initial improvement in some individuals is due to the drug or the placebo effect. After someone has been on a drug for a while it is difficult to get them off it, because even though the medication is having little effect, patients do not want to run the risk of getting worse. In my own practice, 1 advise the patient and family about possible risks and benefits of ChEIs, but have decided recently to try to leave the actual prescription to the primary-care doctor. One major problem in our health-care system today is polypharmacy." - Peter J. Whitehouse and Daniel George, The Myth of Alzheimer's: What You Aren't Being Told About Today's Most Dreaded Diagnosis (Get the book.)

"The ultimate indicator of our newfound faith in scientific psychiatry may be the mysteriously growing placebo effect. When Columbia University psychiatrist Timothy Walsh analyzed seventy-five trials of antidepressants conducted between 1981 and 2000, he discovered that the response rate to placebo, which are, of course, nothing more than sugar pills, increased about 7 percent per decade.80 Simply because people thought they were taking pills, they thought they were going to get better. I saw the power inherent in biological psychiatry, albeit in an entirely different way." - Charles Barber, Comfortably Numb: How Psychiatry Is Medicating a Nation (Get the book.)

"The experimental group's anxiety scores dropped 14 percent versus a statistically insignificant 3 percent for the control group (an improvement that could be explained by the placebo effect). Not coinciden-tally, the experimental groups fitness levels improved 8.5 percent versus 1.8 percent for the control group. Clearly, there is a connection between how much you exercise and how anxious you feel. FEAR ITSELF Anxiety is fear, but what is fear? In neurological terms, fear is the memory of danger." - John J. Ratey, MD, Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain (Get the book.)

"Those parts of the study where the drug has had no or only an insignificant advantage over the placebo effect are simply omitted from the study's final report. The drug companies reporting their findings to the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) only need to prove that the tested drug have shown some benefit in some people. If the researchers manage to recruit enough candidates with a positive disposition that are likely to produce a good placebo response to the drug treatment, they may hit the jackpot and produce a "convincing" study, and a marketable drug." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.)

"Some call this the placebo effect and defend it as such (Kaptchuk 2002). I am unwilling to condone ?perhaps incapable of condoning on philosophical grounds ?such a defense. Coulehan (1991) discusses the chiropractic treatment act. Several authors speak to therapeutic envelopes, usually under a different rubric, such as "matrix" (Hacking 2000) or "domain" (Hazemeijer and Rasker 2003). Discussions of the pharmacology of herbal remedies are now commonplace in the mainstream medical literature (de Smet 2002)." - Nortin M. Hadler MD, Worried Sick: A Prescription for Health in an Overtreated America (Get the book.)

"The bottom line is this: If you believe strongly enough that you have cancer or if you are afraid of it, you face a significant risk of manifesting it in your body. The placebo effect can work both ways. The belief that a deadly disease exists in what is but a defense mechanism of the body can be just as powerful and effective as the belief that a medical drug has healing benefits. In an instant, the energy of your thoughts and beliefs delivers the information they contain to every cell in your body." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.)

"That our minds can heal our bodies is now becoming a proven reality in studies on the placebo effect. There have been television documentaries on how people have been healed completely when they truly believed that a reparative surgery had been performed, or that a certain medication had been administered, even though the surgery wasn't performed and the medication was just a sugar pill. It inevitably disturbs the pharmaceutical manufacturers that in most of their clinical trials, the placebos, the "fake" drugs, prove to be just as effective as the engineered chemical cocktails." - Ron Garner, Conscious Health: A Complete Guide to Wellness Through Natural Means (Get the book.)

"Many people receive a placebo effect, especially early in their first treatment. In studies comparing placebo and antidepressants, the placebos tend to do almost as well in relieving depression in six- to eight-week-long trials.13 If the placebo produces side effects such as dry mouth or blurred vision, mimicking a potent medicine, the placebo becomes as effective as an antidepressant. A very important review examined all the controlled clinical trials submitted to the FDA for the approval of the newer antidepressants." - Peter Breggin, Medication Madness: A Psychiatrist Exposes the Dangers of Mood-Altering Medications (Get the book.)

"The sites that had tested the most patients had a huge placebo effect. In fact, CFS patients at those two sites felt better taking the sugar pill than they did taking the active drug! I'm not sure just what the doctors at those sites did and said to get this striking placebo response, but I would like to bottle it. In my experience and that of others, seeing striking improvement of fatigue with any drug is rare, let alone finding those results with a sugar pill." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.) "Sometimes their profound belief in the treatment is so persuasive that the placebo effect takes over, and the patient actually believes there have been positive results. Would that the medical profession could bottle this effect. So, consider the practitioner who has a treatment guaranteed to cure you; the physician who charges you $5,000 for an evaluation and then sells you a product that he or she endorses (and may even make); or the physician who listens to your story and then goes to the medicine cabinet for drugs that he or she claims are specific for what ails you." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.) "Due to the design of the study, we can't know if symptom improvement was due to the nutraceutical or to the placebo effect. Using the BioBran trial as a point of reference, this study was of such poor quality that it would never be published in the medical literature. Thus the company simply bypassed that process and put the study on the Internet. Buyer Beware I ask myself how such companies manage to be so successful. And successful they are. The company selling Ambrotose reported selling $194 million worth of products in 2004." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"The third possibility is that the women who took the hormones believed that they were doing something that would protect their health and that this placebo effect played a role in keeping them healthier." - John Abramson, Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine (P.S.) (Get the book.)

"Imagine how this situation might magnify a placebo effect. You're sick and someone tells you they felt energized when they took this food supplement. They tell you to try it, then if you like it, you can get it less expensively if you become a seller yourself. Moreover, you can make money selling the product to other patients. That's powerful medicine! The bottom line, of course, must always be improved health— wellness. But you should remain aware that many companies peddling health nutritional supplements may be selling a very expensive form of hope." - Benjamin H. Natelson, M.D., Your Symptoms Are Real: What to Do When Your Doctor Says Nothing Is Wrong (Get the book.)

"A placebo (which literally means, "I shall please") is included as an indispensable element of every scientific study conducted today. The placebo effect is purely based on the subjective feelings of a person. Each person who is tested for the efficacy of a medical drug believes in the drug in a unique and unpredictable way. A certain number of people may have a hopeful, trusting disposition and, therefore, a stronger placebo response than others. Others may be suffering from depression, which is known to affect a person's ability to respond positively to any kind of treatment." - Andreas Moritz, Cancer Is Not A Disease - It's A Survival Mechanism (Get the book.)

"In its entirety, we call this interaction between patient, leaf, and charm, "the placebo effect." In our attempt to understand this very real and important and powerful phenomenon, we consider the placebo's effectiveness, definition, and mode of action. Effectiveness. A British study updates Socrates. In it, 834 women who regularly used analgesics for headache were randomly assigned to one of four groups. The first received aspirin labeled with a widely advertised brand name." - Gerald E. Markle and Frances B. McCrea, What If Medicine Disappeared? (Get the book.)

"If it is so powerful that it can change the state of our body and mimic the effects of pharmaceuticals, then why has medicine ignored this natural healing capability for so long, dismissing it derisively as the placebo effect, and why isn't there a Manhattan Project of health care to explore and harness it? At heart, each of these cases highlights how things as immaterial as mind and thoughts or fields of information play a role in health. The fact that these seemingly miraculous stories are real—and there are hundreds of other such stories in the world's medical literature?" - Peter h. Fraser and Harry Massey, Decoding the Human Body-Field: The New Science of Information as Medicine (Get the book.)

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