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The Clinical Proof of the Power of Suggestion

Written by: Joseph Giove

Article Overview: The American Medical Association and US Food and Drug Administration acknowledge the effectiveness of "suggestion" in all medical treatments.

The Clinical Proof of the Power of Suggestion

Early in my career as a biomedical engineer, designing and building medical diagnostic and therapeutic instruments, I came across this amazing thing called the placebo effect.

A placebo is a fake or sham treatment given in clinical trials to test the efficacy of studied therapies against the power of merely suggesting that a patient will get better.

Nearly every drug and medical devices on the market are tested against the power of your mind to heal your body. However, this was not always the case. Before 1963, drugs that were sold in the United States had to be proven safe, but they did not have to be proven effective. It was common to find many drugs on the market that claimed to be effective for a wide variety of health conditions without any proof that they actually worked. Then, in 1963 Congress enacted an amendment to the Food, Drug, and Cosmetics Act, which required drug manufacturers to actually prove that their products were both safe and effective.

It was common knowledge even then that the power of suggestion could heal a wide array of health disorders, so placebo-controlled clinical trials became the standard proof of effectiveness. This type of clinical trial intentionally obscures or "blinds" both the patient and the researcher to the nature of actual treatment. In other words, some patients receive the studied drug, some receive a dummy drug (the placebo) and some receive no treatment at all, and the doctor administering the treatment does not know which patient is in what group.

I was astounded to find out how strong this effect was, often as high as 50% of the efficacy of many drug and device therapies. The power of suggestion, the placebo, has been studied copiously over the last hundred years: scientists measure it, document it, compare it to "real" therapies and no therapy, and unequivocally acknowledge its effectiveness. What is most astonishing, however, is that this great power to influence disease recovery is then fully discarded when it comes to helping the patient in clinical practice! And even worse, a doctor's well-intentioned prognosis can easily form an extremely effective negative suggestion, called a nocebo, which can make matters worse.

Of course you cannot patent or license someone's own healing capacity, so there is no economic incentive for the medical system to promote the power of suggestion and self-healing.

Even so, I became enamored with understanding the mechanism of the placebo effect and how this might actually be used intentionally to empower the patient with his or her own healing. After all, the clinician may have fooled the patient with his sham treatment, but it was the patient herself that actually, unconsciously performed the healing, whether it was from ulcers, asthma, cancer or depression. To be sure, the success was not merely "in the head" either: physical and measurable effects are always documented.

I found that the secret to using this powerful mechanism, the power of suggestion, lied in the poorly understood realms of consciousness, as it applies to human wellness and performance. I became a Clinical Hypnotist in the late 1980s as this seemed to be the most practical and direct application of this self-healing modality. In studying and applying various mind-body techniques that initiate the body's own creative energies, which often lie dormant in the subconscious, I found I could teach someone how to activate this powerful mechanism on their own. This forms the basis of much of my work, whether it is helping individuals master stress, recover from illness, enhance performance, succeed in a venture, or discover their life meaning through alchemical hypnosis.

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Article Tags: array, biomedical engineer, blinds, clinical trial, clinical trials, common knowledge, cosmetics, drug manufacturers, efficacy, food drug, health conditions, health disorders, hundred years, medical devices, placebo effect, power of suggestion, researcher, scientists, sham treatment, therapeutic instruments



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