Is it All in the Mind?

If you’ve been taking your medicine for quite some time and your condition is still the same, does that mean your medicine is not working?

You would expect a medicine to have the appropriate effect to work on healing a particular ailment but when it works on one person and not another, then this may be due to what is called the placebo effect.

The placebo effect is where an improvement in health is not necessarily attributable to the treatment; something else is at play here. The term is used quite extensively by critics of complementary medicine but in fact it can be applied to all treatments. There has been little known on what it actually is and how it works or even how effective it is in treatment until only recently.

Professor Irving Kirsch at the University of Hull has done extensive research on the effects of placebo, anti-depressant medication, hypnosis, suggestion and the power of belief. Honestly, I can only say I’m hooked by the depth of his understanding. I’m not going to do justice to his lifetime’s work in this small space but I would like to give you a flavour of things you could consider when you go for treatment.

The way you think about your treatment and whether you believe your treatment will work for you can have a significant effect on its outcome. Kirsch noted the power of belief and expectancy of treatment was as essential to monitor as the testing of the drug itself. When drawing conclusions about its effect you could then pin down whether success was really due to the medicine or to the belief people had in their treatment.

Kirsch found that there were certain conditions where the placebo effect was high, particularly in pain and depression. For example, he found that at the centre of depression is hopelessness and one needs hope for recovery. This is why the power of belief can be very effective here. So does medication have an effect at all on depression? Well, very little according to the data he presented to the Royal College of Physicians in 2007. Yet we, as a society, spend a huge amount on anti-depressant medicines that seemingly have very little significance according to Kirsch’s research. You can read his speech to the RCP at the Integrated Health Foundation’s website.

Getting the most effective treatment for yourself may be trickier than you once thought. The medicine you take, the rapport with your physician and how you think are all part of the success of your treatment. Ensure you keep to a comprehensive Health Plan and include treatments you feel comfortable with and observe progress within yourself – that’s always a good indicator whether it’s working for you or not.

It’s taken 50 years for us to realise the effects of smoking and implement a smoking ban [in the uk] and another 50 years for us to get acupuncture into the NHS. We don’t know everything there is to know about health but there are certainly treatments that have an effect which haven’t even reached our health service.

Rumana Zahn is a Naturopath and Medical Herbalist and runs clinics in Newcastle (within a GPs practice) and Yarm. She is a leader within the field of Natural Medicine, writes and speaks extensively on the subject. She can be contacted on 0845 680 1418 or www.rumanahealth.com

Rumana is a member of the British Register of Complementary Practitioners.

 

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