Are Prescription Drugs Really Curing You?

The French psychiatrist Patrick Lemoine was quoted in theNew Scientist as having made the astonishing admission that something like 35-40 per cent of all official prescriptions given patients are ‘impure’ placebos. By that he means a sugar pill that has no active ingredient to effect any cure.

He was saying more than 1/3 of all prescriptions are dummy pills and if they work at all, it’s because of the power of the mind.

The placebo effect has shown that beliefs are powerful, even when the belief is false. The placebo is a form of intention – an instance of intention trickery. When a doctor gives a patient a placebo, or sugar pill, he or she is counting on the patient’s belief that the drug will work.

It is well documented that belief in a placebo will create the same physiological effects as that of an active agent. Lemoine says that the placebo effect ‘depends on the relationship between the patient and the doctor—the belief on the part of the patient that what the doctor has given him will work.

In a study involving 46,000 heart patients, half of whom were taking a placebo, the researchers made the astonishing discovery that patients taking a placebo fared as well as those on the heart drug. The patient’s belief in the doctor’s ‘power’ had mostly to do with his getting better. What he actually took—whether real drug or placebo—made absolutely no difference.

The only factor determining survival seemed to be belief that the therapy will work and a willingness to follow it religiously.

Those who stuck to doctor’s orders to take their drug three times a day fared equally well whether they were taking a drug or just a sugar pill. Patients who tended not to survive were those who had been lax with their regimen, regardless of whether they had been given a placebo or an actual drug.

In another dramatic instance, at Methodist Hospital in Houston, Dr Bruce Moseley, a specialist in orthopaedics, recruited 150 patients with severe osteoarthritis of the knee and divided them into three groups.

Two-thirds were either given arthroscopic lavage (which washes out degenerative tissue and debris with the aid of a little viewing tube). The third group were given a sham operation: The patients were surgically prepared, placed under anaesthesia and wheeled into the operating room. Incisions were made in their knees, but no procedure carried out.

Over the next two years, during which time none of the patients knew who had received the real operations and who had received the placebo treatment, all three groups reported moderate improvements in pain and function. In fact, the placebo group reported better results than some who had received the actual operation (New England Journal of Medicine, 2002).

The mental expectation of healing was enough to marshal the body’s healing mechanisms. The intention, brought about by the expectation of a successful operation, produced the physical change.

Perhaps the most remarkable case concerned a woman called Annie, whose severe depression landed her in a Lemoine’s psychiatric hospital for more than a decade. Most of her days were spent curled up in an armchair in the corner of her ward. After Lemoine struck up a friendship with her, he persuaded her to take part in a trial of a new antidepressant. She agreed and responded so well to the drug that she was able to leave the hospital. Subsequently she found both an apartment and a boyfriend. Her case in fact may have helped get the drug on the market.

Much later, when the ward was being redecorated, Lemoine found the antidepressant pills Annie was supposed to have taken, buried deep in the folds of her armchair. She’d hid them away, he realized, and when he checked he discovered she hadn’t taken even one.

Instances like this convince me that for the most part, we don’t need drugs, just our sincere belief that something is going to work.