How to Trigger the Placebo Effect for Self-Healing

Wake up to the amount of pessimism and cynicism that characterize your thinking.

Most of us have learned not to put our trust into very many things. We feel like gullible fools when we trust. We have been duped so often by the government, the media, the justice system, the Church, and the people in our lives, that what we fear most is more duping. And we have heard enough stories and seen enough proof of the dreadful failures of biomedicine to be left with little faith in doctors and their treatments.

We know in our bones that we have been misled by the claims of modern medicine, but having little knowledge and less faith in any "reasonable" alternative, and having been taught from the time our milk teeth came in that without doctors we will die, we keep going back to them. The irrationality of our reasonableness doesn't occur to us: We tend to be like a man I know who was exasperated to the point of fury when a friend who practiced Christian Science died of cancer. Yet the same man accepted as an unavoidable tragedy the death of his own wife by cancer after she had exhausted all conventional cancer treatments.

Be Mindful of Your Pessimism -- You Must Trust Something

If you don't trust doctors, though, you must trust something -- or your chance of getting well is slim, indeed. Lack of trust coupled with low élan vital is perilous. Karl Menninger found in "a good many men and women suffering from cancer, an indifference to life, a detachment from life." No treatment can make you well if you are secretly tired of life. So, first, be mindful of your pessimism -- bitterness, disappointment, displeasure may occupy your mind more than you know.

1. Wake up to the nocebos that assail you on every side.

A nocebo can be anything, just as a placebo can be anything, depending entirely upon your reaction to it. But the most dangerous nocebos are those that are institutionalized. Outside of religious or quasi-religious organizations, our society has no institutionalized placebos -- but it is loaded with institutionalized nocebos. I have already discussed them at various places in this book, but -- whether you are well or sick -- it is so important to be vigilant that I will list some nocebos again.


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If you want to shift to a healing state of consciousness, avoid the following:

- Support groups that encourage members to continually rehash their problems and to share graphic descriptions of their disease and its effects upon their body. These groups also reinforce the person's self-identification as a diseased person.

- Creative visualization exercises that involve visualizing the enemy (in whatever form the enemy takes), even if victory over the enemy is also visualized.

- Advertisements and commercials that sell their product by scaring people into thinking that they already are or are very likely to be sick. Don't read them. Don't watch them.

- Religions that imply that sickness is a punishment for wrongdoing and/or a way to expiate sin.

- Religions that imply that sickness is a good thing -- sent by God as a test of worthiness and strength of character.

- Movies, television programs, and books that describe illnesses, accidents, and medical procedures in precise detail and that make sickness, accidents, and disease glamorous and heroic.

- Doctors who practice "life-cycle medicine" -- the theory taught to most medical students that health is defined by the age of the patient and that physical deterioration correlates with aging and should be expected. Life-cycle medicine regards ill health as normal and perceives the patient as analogous to a machine whose various parts wear out after a certain amount of use -- what is healthy at 60 includes conditions that at 30 would have initiated extreme medical interventions. That a person can remain robust and healthy into very old age is a concept foreign to life-cycle medicine.

2. Wake up to your nocebo thoughts.

Nocebo thoughts are easy to recognize. They keep you up at night. With the exception of excited anticipation of some wonderful event, what goes on in your mind when you are trying to sleep is a nocebo thought. Your mind may repetitively analyze a present circumstance, or continually recapitulate a past grievance, or keep imagining some future catastrophe. These sleep-preventing mental states stoke the adrenaline and cause additional harm that medicine has just begun to understand. You do not toss and turn thinking happy thoughts.

You can begin to rid your life of unhappy thoughts by becoming aware when you have them. Unhappy thoughts enter our minds as automatically as we turn the blinker on when we turn a corner. As with any habit, it takes practice and determination to change -- a conscious, forcible yanking of the mind to a brighter place.

One of the most healthful states you can achieve is to become sick and tired of being sick and tired. Then you will discover that it doesn't take long-term psychotherapy to dislodge the world of unhappiness that inhabits your mind. You can dispose of it in the same way you dispose of trash, by taking it to the curb on collection day -- you just do it.

I can virtually hear some readers' roar of objection: "You are recommending denial and repression. You are telling us to put a Band-Aid on a wound that will be come gangrenous if it isn't cleaned out!" Well, yes and no. It is essential to be awake to what we are feeling and thinking. Psychiatrist Mark Epstein says, "When we refuse to acknowledge ... unwanted feelings, we are as bound to them as when we give ourselves over to them."

On the other hand, we know the truth of "use it or lose it." That truth applies equally in reverse: If you want to lose it, do not use it. If you exercise an idea or an emotion, you will not lose its effects on your life. Continually rehashing childhood traumas, adolescent rejections, and adult failures keeps them alive and kicking.

3. When Karl Menninger expected the recovery rate to be low among people with weak élan vital, he was not referring to full-blown clinical depression; he was referring to normal people who drag through their days feeling overburdened, unimportant, and unaccomplished. Such people may not particularly wish to be well, because well or sick, they are the same old person in the same old life -- the life that attracted sickness in the first place. Conventional psychotherapy might actually interfere with healing when it concentrates on familiar problems and their causes.

For just this reason, Lawrence LeShan has given up practicing conventional psychotherapy. I quote him at length:

"A final reason I became increasingly uncomfortable with the psychoanalytic approach with patients with severe cancers is that at the end of a year and a half or so, I could see that the psychotherapy was having little if any effect on the development of the cancers.... They all died, and so far as I could tell, in about the same length of time as they would have died without the work we were doing."

Traditionally, the fundamental questions posed by psychotherapy have been, "What are the symptoms? What is hidden that is causing them? What can we do about it?"

No matter how how well therapy uncovered and worked through psychological problems that developed early in life, LeShan found that "the cancers proceeded at the same pace." So he began to ask new questions: "What was right about this person? ... What should her life be like so that she is glad to get up in the morning and glad to go to bed at night? ... What are the unique ways of being, relating, expressing, creating, valid for this person? What has blocked her perception of them in the past? What blocks her expression now?"

As patients became involved in answering these questions, in discovering their individual "songs," the rate of tumor growth was in fact slowed. After 12 years, LeShan followed up on 22 patients who had been considered terminal and found that of those who became engaged in the process of self-discovery -- shifting their focus from their illness to their unrealized potential self -- a remarkable 50 percent achieved long-term remission.

Unlike conventional psychotherapy, which travels back into the past and moves forward toward the disease as though it were the climax of their lives, LeShan's psychotherapy begins with the present and moves away from the disease into the future. If you use psychotherapy, seek out a variety like LeShan's.

4. Be awake to your "faith" choices and expand them.

For instance, you might acknowledge intellectually that two doctors have very similar skills, but you would choose the one who is cheerful instead of the one who is solemn because cheerfulness is a trait that heightens your expectation of getting well. Another person's faith might be triggered by the solemn doctor.

5. The dominant culture won't encourage you to have faith in your own good health.

Seek out small organizations that help foster your faith in health. These might be church groups, alternative medicine groups, or independent, upbeat self-help groups. Flee groups that teach the separation of spirit and body, as though there were two of you -- your soul and the "dying animal" it is fastened to.

6. Stay away from situations and persons that are toxic to you.

These are easy to recognize: You are not at ease when you are with them, and when you leave, you feel a lingering disquietude and displeasure with yourself. You can know what is bad for your spirit the same way you know what is bad for your body -- it hurts.

7. Seek out situations that make you feel good: a gathering of friends, a walk in the woods, music, dancing -- whatever is accompanied by good feelings while you are doing it and not followed by bad feelings when you stop.

8. Explore alternative medicine, any form you feel intuitively drawn to.

I attach a caveat to this advice: Don't become an alternative medicine junkie, hurrying from one treatment mode to another. There are no panaceas. What you are looking for is yourself, the ultimate source of your own healing.

9. Pray. Prayer is a type of autosuggestion.

God does not have to be persuaded. You cannot change God's mind by praying; prayer changes your mind. It clarifies and articulates what you want, and by doing so helps you to deliver it to yourself. Some who claim not to believe in God (or in something analogous to God) admit they sometimes pray spontaneously or out of desperation. I would say that these people believe with their hearts though not with their intellects. God does not withhold anything from you and therefore cannot grant anything to you as a reward for praying.

Prayer is a powerful placebo, but most of us pray intermittently and lapse into habitual negative thoughts when the prayer is over. What are you thinking now? That is your prayer. What are you thinking now?

The thought that can change you is the thought you are thinking now. When you can submit to the healing presence in the universe, which is available to you all the time, you will actually feel the flow of health through your body.

10. Meditate.

Neurophysiologist J.P Banquet says, "New sciences like psychoneuroimmunology, the study of the mind's ability to control the body's immune system, are showing that meditation can be used not only to prevent illness, but also to treat even terminal illnesses like cancer." Actually, meditation is both a placebo trigger and a spiritual state. As a trigger it takes you away from the malady; it "detaches" you from your illness (and from all other concerns as well), and in that detachment or "forgetfulness," healing occurs. As a spiritual state, it can "provide access to an alternative reality." Meditation doesn't arouse faith in anything, but meditation is a state of union of the self with the Self.

11. Acquire the habit of using affirmations.

Though affirmations are a sign of the desire to have faith, more than arrival at the "place" of faith, they are a notable form of autosuggestion. In some spiritual disciplines -- Christian Science, Unity, Science of Mind -- affirmations are sometimes called treatments. The individual affirms that he or she already possesses what is desired.

In a sense, affirmations are prayers of gratitude. They do not beseech. They ask for nothing. There is nothing to ask for because the affirmation acknowledges that whatever is desired is already at hand. Affirmations end with "and so it is."

Some people who practice affirmations mistakenly think of them as magical chants, as though the words cause something to happen. Affirmations make nothing happen outside yourself. They make something happen inside yourself: They change your thoughts; your changed thoughts change your world. An affirmation is a tool to change your mind. When your mind is changed, the affirmation is no longer needed.

12. Use creative visualization.

In the subconscious, thought often takes the form of images. As with dreams, the subconscious "believes" that the image is fact.

13. Allow yourself to try direct suggestion for a physical or emotional problem you may have.

The practitioner of direct suggestion uses only words. If touch is used, it is used to soothe and comfort, as an expression of love, not as the source of the healing.

Direct suggestion is the method used by the Emmanuel Church. Early in their ministry in the late nineteenth century, the Emmanuels put their method to a severe test. At that time, tuberculosis was a common disease for which the only known treatments were a change of climate or the rest and special diet offered by expensive sanitaria -- treatments obviously not available to the poor. The Emmanuel Church "attempted to ascertain whether the poorest consumptive might not be treated successfully in the slums and tenements of a great city."

The practitioner Edward Worcester would sit at the bedside of patients and quietly assure them that they were in a state of peace and well-being, guiding them into profound relaxation. Often they sank into a deep sleep, which Worcester believed was essential to healing. When they awoke it was as though they were following posthypnotic suggestion: They would be in less pain even if their bones were broken. Or they would feel hungry -- even if they had been rejecting all food.

"For eighteen years," writes Worcester, "our results were as good as those of the most favored sanitaria. Then the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, impressed by these facts, took over our work. Its physical equipment was, of course, far better than ours, but it could not command the faith, the courage and obedience and the cheerfulness of mind we had managed to instill into our patients, and it was not able to approach our results." Direct suggestion directs the self to heal the self.

The great healers mentioned in this book -- Mesmer, Quimby, Eddy, LeShan -- all pointed to the source of power as the patient, and not themselves. LeShan concluded that the ability to heal was not an "arcane talent" but "a set of acquirable skills." If he could acquire these skills, he reasoned, so could the patient himself. LeShan asserts that anyone who can enter into two or three seconds of absolute belief in wellness has become his own faith healer.

And Jesus, of course the most renowned faith healer of all time, said, "What I do, can ye also do." In several places, the New Testament states that Jesus' power was limited by the degree of faith of others: At Nazareth, Jesus was "astonished at their lack of faith," and could do no "work of power." Jesus' true power lay in his ability to inspire faith.

Psychotherapy and the Placebo Effect

In his important book Persuasion and Healing, Jerome Frank uses psychotherapy as the model situation in which the placebo effect is brought into play. All schools of psychotherapy, he writes, include four elements that are also present in faith healing, in shamanistic rituals, and in religious revivalism.

Psychotherapy requires: "1) the patient's confidence in the therapist's ability and desire to help, 2) a socially sanctioned place where treatment is administered, 3) a 'myth' or basic conceptual framework to explain the patient's symptoms, and 4) an easy task for the patient to perform and initially succeed at in order to counteract the demoralization that most patients have experienced in life...... Frank concludes, "One might view psychotherapy, in this regard, as a highly organized way of bringing the placebo effect to bear......

I extend Frank's conclusion to all situations in which healing occurs. The primitive witch doctor may catch the disease demon on a thread, seal it in a bottle, and sink the bottle in the sea. The New Age practitioner might write the problem on a piece of paper, burn the paper, and scatter the ashes to the wind. Biomedicine may dress the patient in a peculiar white gown and pass his body through a tunnel-like machine.

All these rituals are part of a healing ceremony, and they evoke faith in an outcome; they play on the imagination and the emotions of the participants. Hypnosis, Hatha Yoga, Raja Yoga, crystals, creative visualization, affirmations, prayer -- all provide lessons in faith: The subject submits to a higher power.

Know Thyself

The number of nocebos and placebos is inexhaustible. For that reason, self-awareness is essential. Know thyself; know what arouses pessimism and a dark vision and what awakens hope and energy. Know what inspires confidence, optimism, and the emotions you associate with well-being. Know what arouses fear, pessimism, and negativity.

When we recognize that a placebo for one person will not necessarily be a placebo for another and recognize that we cannot control all the variables of a sick person's life, we return to the critical flaw in biomedicine. The scientific method must control the boundaries of the object under examination. It must regard the object under examination as a whole thing. But the combination of person/milieu/time that is involved in all healing is both dynamic and without boundaries.

Medicine asks what specifically causes this or that healing and it is always looking for a particular thing or procedure. The interrogative should not be what, it should be how. How does healing take place?

This question leads us to look for the common element in all healing. This question acknowledges that there are myriad modes and contradictory means, all of which have resulted in healing. As the wise saying goes, "Each of us guards a gate of change that can only be unlocked from the inside."

Triggering the Placebo Effect

If medicine can never predict what will cure a given person, how then can we ever rely on a given cure? We can't. But we can learn to know ourselves. We can trigger the placebo effect.

Galen was the scientific mind, par excellence, of his era, and for a long time he looked upon nonscientific cures as old wives' tales. Yet, ultimately, he acknowledged the superior power of faith. He directed physicians to "try magical remedies when all else failed and whenever a patient frankly confessed his belief in their virtue."

Jesus' disciples talk almost exclusively of faith, and they do not always mean faith in Jesus, just as Jesus does not only mean faith in himself. When they speak of faith, they mean faith qua faith: the principle of faith, faith-fullness, faith as a child has faith, a heart willing to believe -- an open heart. "Ye of little faith" -- you who are the skeptics, the cynics, the jaded, the immovable, the closed-hearted -- even Jesus would not be able to heal you.

One final word. For years I held the truth of my healing, like a poker player, close to my chest -- because when I spoke of cancer, I was confronted by the terror of others, erroneous advice, and dire warnings. So, if you are stepping onto the path of self-healing, my final suggestion is to keep silent about your attempts or achievements.

To paraphrase what Jesus said to the healed blind man, do not stop at the village, but go straight home. For unless others are embarked upon the same journey, they will be sorely threatened and will attempt to wrench you from your path with "facts" and fears. When the reality of self-healing has become so rooted in your consciousness that no other reality is thinkable, then you can speak.

Reprinted with permission of the publisher,
Origin Press. ©2001. www.originpress.com

Article Source

Faith and the Placebo Effect: An Argument for Self Healing
by Lolette Kuby.


Click here for more info and/or to order this book. (2013 edition)

About the Author

Lolette Kuby

Previous to the unusual events that led up to the writing of this book, Lolette Kuby, Ph.D., was a widely-published poet and critic, as well as political activist and advocate for the arts. She has been a university English teacher and professional editor and writer. Uncertain in her beliefs, there was little in her previous way of life that prepared her for the healing epiphany and spiritual revelation that led her to develop the radical argument presented in Faith and the Placebo Effect.