Mind/Body Medicine – It Works!

I was watching a show on PBS the other day. It was showing how mind/body medicine was being accepted more in hospitals and other mainstream settings. At the end of the show an MD stated that all this was nice, but it would be wrong to give the impression that any of this worked because there were no studies. No Studies! Mind/Body medicine is the most studied medicine in the world.

Every drug that comes to market has been studied specifically in how it compares to mind/body medicine. Does this come as a surprise to you? It would to that MD. Perhaps it is because they use another term for mind/body medicine – they call it placebo.

Placebo Drug Studies:

The most respected studies these days are double blind, placebo-controlled trials. This means some of the subjects are given a drug, others are given a placebo – a fake pill, and nobody knows which is which. There are thousands and thousands of studies showing that people get better with the fake pill. This means that their mind is healing their body.

Placebo Surgery Studies:

Surgeries are generally not studied for effectiveness. We just do them. There are two studies that I am aware of – one from the 1950’s and one just recently. The fake surgery had better results in both cases. This isn’t surprising – surgery does so much damage, I could see that a fake surgery – where only the skin was cut could be better in many cases.

What you can do:

You don’t need someone to give you a fake pill to activate your placebo response. You can take charge of your response using such tools as prayer, meditation and qigong. I like qigong a lot and have been involved with the Qigong Association of America for many years.