Ethics and the Placebo Effect

To the best of modern understanding, warts are caused by a virus.  They can be removed by freezing or they can be cut off surgically, but they often return.  Did you know that there used to be a safe and effective method for “healing” the common wart?  The patient would go to his family doctor.  In his office, the physician would have an impressive piece of equipment.  The patient would insert the hand or foot with the wart into the machine.  The doctor would switch on the device, lights would flash, the machine would vibrate and, sometimes, a small electrical current would give the patient a tingling sensation. The doctor would switch off the device and inform the patient that there wart had been “killed” and that it would simply slough away over the next week. And the majority of the time that is exactly what happened. The wart would fade away never to return.

Now, with modern eyes we can see that this machine was a hoax and the old timey doctor was simply fooling the patient. The warts only went away because of the placebo effect.  But wait a minute, THE WARTS WENT AWAY, something a modern doctor cannot do.

Of course we don’t want to return to the days of snake-oil salesmen and doctors actively lying to their patients. That being said, we must take away from this the fact that there are healing abilities within the human body that are not well understood, but are observably under the active control of the mind at some level.

In modern drug studies, typically half of the patients are given a new medication and half an inert placebo such as a sugar pill, and they are not told who gets what. In almost every study some of the placebo group show improvement and the studies are judged by the ratio between the two groups. For the most part, modern medicine ignores these effects.  Since they can’t be quantified, synthesized, bottled and sold, these results are just an annoyance to the” business” of medicine. There are even documented cases of spontaneous remissions from the most ghastly of cancers and diseases that “just went away.” These cases are miraculous to the individual involved, but useless to the scientific model of medicine and are just treated as aberrations in their statistical models.

These self-healing abilities are very real and a tremendous underutilized resource for anyone facing medical challenges.  We’ve seen that the so called “placebo effect” can be activated by just the 50/50 hope that you’ve received some new wonder drug.  The question is, how to activate it without relying on trickery and ethically questionable practices?  In fact, I would postulate that is this information age it would impossible to pass off a “Magic Wart Machine,” much less any mystical cancer cure.

I believe that the hypnotic state could be used proactively, and with a person’s knowledge and consent, to activate this self-healing ability, this “Placebo Effect” and turn it into a reliable tool.  This is especially true if used in a Hypno-Energetic format, where the alternative medicinal practices of Asia, with their centuries’ long track record of success, can be brought to bear.

It has been well documented that a subject in trance has active control over functions that are normally controlled by the unconscious autonomic nervous system. Functions such as:  pain, blood pressure, body temperature and even blood flow. It is certainly not a stretch to believe that the hyper-focus of a well induce hypnotic state could place the physiological functions activated by the placebo effect under the active control of the conscious mind.

Think of the increase in the effectiveness of a medical treatment plan if it had the full cooperation of the body’s self-healing mechanism. It would give people (with the cooperation of their physicians) the flexibility to reduce or render unnecessary some medications or treatments and could assist in the mitigation of the harsh side effect of those that continue.

I have the greatest respect for the advances in medical care over the last century and I absolutely do not consider this a replacement for modern medical care, but it can be a powerful adjunct to it.