The Associated Press has a great story today examining the role of the placebo effect in medicine - both real medicine and stuff like Reiki. It’s a well done article, neither pooh-poohing nor pretending that a couple of anecdotes provide legitimate evidence. It includes details about how lots of double-blind tests haven’t found anything real done by most alternative therapies, and yet they often “work” because the placebo effect works surprisingly often. Some selected bits:

The placebo effect accounts for about a third of the benefits of any treatment — even carefully tested medicines, scientists say. This dates to a landmark report in 1955 called The Powerful Placebo (you can read it here). Viewed as groundbreaking, the analysis of dozens of studies by H.K. Beecher found that 32 percent of patients responded to a placebo.

Emotions, too, can trigger physical changes. Take the case of a child with croup. Crying tightens the airways and makes it tougher to breathe. Many people believe that cool mist is helpful, but when it has been tested in hospital studies with croup tents, it has not been found to help, said Dr. Owen Hendley, a pediatrician at the University of Virginia. Try it at home, though, and you may get a different result.

“The child sits in the lap of the mother and the mother holds the mist maker close to the child. The child settles down, the mother settles down. The setting, and the mother feeling that it is helping, makes everybody calmer,” and the child actually is able to breathe better, Hendley explained.

In Baltimore, the University of Maryland Medical Center’s shock trauma center is offering some patients Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through invisible energy fields manipulated by a special “master.” The hospital’s anesthesia chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, says it is self-hypnosis and compares it to Lamaze classes that teach pregnant women breathing exercises to take their minds off the pain of labor.

Tags: placebo