The Hidden Factor of Natural Good Health

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So, how can you possibly manage to find a way through this barrage of information that often seems to conflict with your experience?

The clue may be in some very interesting research on the ‘placebo effect’, which demonstrates that a person’s beliefs alone can make him or her better.

Many doctors today use placebo pills on a regular basis. The pill itself is just a sugar pill with no medicinal properties but the patient doesn’t know this. Because the patients have belief in the doctor and belief in the medicine they’ve been given, they become well again.

Even more astounding was the result of a major trial in the USA on the placebo effect of surgery for arthritis of the knee.

A team of surgeons in Texas tested the procedure by performing the surgery on 180 patients with osteoarthritis in the knee. Two-thirds had two different types of the surgery.

But for a third, the surgeons went through the motions by giving a tranquilizer, making three incisions and pretending to do the surgery.

All participants in the study had to sign their chart to show that they understood they might receive the placebo surgery, which would not help their arthritic knee.

Most arthroscopic surgery on the knee is done to repair injured ligaments and cartilage, which doctors say is useful. The experiment was designed to see whether the surgery helped reduce pain and increase mobility in patients with an arthritic knee.

The researchers found patients who underwent the placebo surgery were just as likely to report pain relief as those who received the real procedure. It seems for osteoarthritis patients, the relief is all in patients’ heads.

Dr. Bruce Moseley, an orthopaedics professor at Baylor College

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