Placebo

From latin "I shall please", the placebo effect is when you get better after taking an inert substance or having alternative treatment which is deemed (by orthodox medicine) ineffective. However, this is not just a case of you getting better - the placebo effect specifically refers to you responding to a treatment which could not possibly have had any medical benefit. Your brain told you to get better, so you did.

Some trials claim 35% - 50% of patients responding positively to placebo's. Many theories have been advanced to explain this, but I find most unsatisfactory. What these statistics do illustrate is the difficulty of carrying out accurate and unbiased tests.

The placebo effect is often advanced as the reason why homeopathic medicine works. Orthodox medicine can not accept that solutions with less than one molecule of the original substance could have any medicinal affect on the patient. So when there is an improvement in the condition the official explanation is "the placebo effect". An effect that seems remarkably repeatable.

It is true that the brain is a magnificent and severly understood organ of the body. As I outlined in the framework, the majority of the brain is part of the "unconscious", which is responsible for many of the body functions involved in fighting disease and healing. The placebo effect could be a term for a scientific process going on beneath the level of our awareness, in the unconscious brain. Unconscious does not mean stupid or dull or simple - it means that we do not have any conscious awareness of what is going on.

Whilst statistics exist for the placebo effect, it is harder to find statistics on the number of patients treated unsuccessfully with traditional medicine. In my own case, I sought out alternative medicine because I could not find a remedy from my doctor or pharmacy. I tried a great many, and they didn't work. But the placebo effect works repeatably!

I consider the term "placebo" a placeholder - traditional medicine uses it as a marker for a phenomenon which is repeatable with high rates of success (35% - 50% reported), but which they do not currently understand. At that time the effect will become scientific and an alternative name will be given. Unfortunately, this may not come about until there is a general shift and increase in consciousness of the overall population.