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I never thought I'd say this, but I miss voter fraud.
The doctor-patient relationship is critical to the placebo effect.
We have known about the placebo effect for many years. This is a remarkable effect - placebo can cure 30 percent in many cases.
I do a lot of research on the placebo effect, not just in depression but in irritable bowel syndrome, pain, arthritis of the knee, migraine, asthma.
I often felt better as soon as I swallowed my vitamin C, long before it had time to take effect. Medical researchers call it 'placebo effect'; I prefer to call it magic, for it occurs when something - a pill or a word - is imbued with power and meaning, and so it becomes effective. That is alchemy.
If the brain expects that a treatment will work, it sends healing chemicals into the bloodstream, which facilitates that. That's why the placebo effect is so powerful for every type of healing. And the opposite is equally true and equally powerful: When the brain expects that a therapy will not work, it doesn't. It's called the "nocebo" effect.
Eventually it became clear that our emotions, attitudes, and thoughts profoundly affect our bodies, sometimes to the degree of life or death. Soon mind-body effects were recognized to have positive as well as negative impacts on the body. This realization came largely from research on the placebo effect—the beneficial results of suggestion, expectation, and positive thinking.
Only massage therapists seemed to be informed about trigger points and referred pain, and only exceptional individuals among them (in my own experience at least) were treating trigger points effectively. What's more, the burgeoning variety of unproven modalities offered by massage therpaists gave the profession such an aura of flakiness that the elegant science of myofascial pain got unfairly confused with treatments whose results could easily be attributed to the placebo effect.