A survey of doctors reported in the TVNZ health news last month shows that one in seven have prescribed “placebos” – inactive medications – for their patients. The reasons given (reported in a letter to the NZ Medical Journal – subscriber-only access, unfortunately) include: patients making “unjustified” demands for medication, which I take to mean that they were demanding medication when in fact they did not need any or there was no suitable medication to give them; for non-specific complaints; after all clinically indicated treatment possibilities were exhausted; to calm the patient; to get the patient to stop complaining; to distinguish whether the symptoms were being created by an organic problem or the mind of the patient.
The obvious problem here is that people are going to their doctors expecting medication, even when medication is not what they actually need, and sometimes doctors give them something to satisfy them rather than argue about it.
The most common thing told to patients is that the medicine they are being given “may help and will not do any harm”. The most common placebo is antibiotics when the problem is viral, not bacterial, which is a concern because it may increase antibiotic resistance in the population (and is also expensive). But other “placebos” include vitamins and herbal supplements, with the classic “sugar pill” being quite uncommon. Most of the doctors did expect some positive effect from the treatment even though it was biochemically not likely to be effective, and indeed it’s well-known that the placebo effect accounts for up to 30-40% of the effectiveness of medication. In other words, a good third of the effect of medication is in fact the patient’s belief that it will do them good.
The power of the body-mind connection is very interesting, and personally I prefer to use it directly without any window dressing or props. I’m reading a fascinating book at the moment, Candace Pert’s Molecules of Emotion, about her work in discovering the biochemistry which underlies human emotional experience and links the mind and body together into a single system. I’ll be posting more about it once I’ve finished reading it, but in the meantime I leave you to consider: What if these doctors and their patients were open to using mind-body methods directly, rather than going the long way around?
Technorati Tags: mind-body, placebo
Related posts:
- Doctors: hypnotize your patientsEarlier this month, Professor David Speigel of Stanford University addressed...
- Meditation, not medication, for depressionThe BBC reports on a UK study showing that group...
- Hypnotherapy Works for Irritable Bowel SyndromeTara Parker-Pope reports in the Health section of the New...
- Hypnosis around surgery saves money, time, and painI recently came across a 2007 study: A Randomized Clinical...
- Antidepressant drug trials: Placebo almost as good for most patientsThere’s been a lot of attention paid to a study...