How Real Is The Placebo Effect?(Brief Article)

The medical establishment has long held that a substance can have a medicinal effect simply because a patient believes it will. The conventional wisdom about this placebo effect, which harks back to a paper published in 1955, has been that it works for one patient in three. That's not a bad ratio, especially for a treatment that has no side effects. Some doctors have even proposed using the placebo effect as a bona fide medical treatment. But many doctors are uncomfortable with the easygoing notion that mere belief can heal the body. Late last month a paper in the journal Science gave them some ammunition, suggesting that the power of placebo is a myth.

The study certainly gores some oxen. A whole medical industry has sprung up based on the mind's presumed power over the body. The growing popularity of alternative medicines and treatments--everything from Chinese herbs and yoga to acupuncture and faith healing--has been fueled in part by the medical respectability of the placebo effect.

The higher echelon of the placebo industry, as epitomized by Herbert Benson, is more difficult to dismiss. Benson started out as a Harvard cardiologist but became a convert to the power of mind. He helped found the Mind-Body Institute, which develops techniques to help patients of all types cope with stress. His work has been widely imitated. Cancer patients are now given seminars on how to use meditation to mitigate the anxiety of chemotherapy and promote their own healing. Couples undergoing infertility treatment are taught how to reduce stress, which, they are told, may interfere with the reproductive process. Benson insists that the mind-set of the patient and the physician, as well as the quality of their relationship, is crucial to the effectiveness of many medical treatments. This amounts to a somewhat broadened definition of the placebo effect.

Benson is not the only placebo doctor. Studies of psychotherapy have shown that it doesn't matter whether your shrink is a Jungian or a Freudian or a Roman Catholic priest: all talk therapies seem to work equally well (or poorly). This sounds suspiciously like a placebo. Does this mean psychotherapy is worthless?

Perhaps, but only if you take the Science paper at face value. At first glance, the authors, two Danish medical researchers, seem to have built a strong case. They collated data from 130 previous studies in which two kinds of control groups were used--a group given a placebo and a group given no treatment. Then they analyzed the data to see if there was any statistical difference between the two groups. ...