One Study Invalidates Much of medical Science
My lifelong assertion that much of medical science is unquestionably wishful mental has now been confirmed by new, groundbreaking scientific explore bright the, so far, underestimated medical power behind sick person expectation. The study, entitled "The corollary of treatment prospect on Drug Efficacy: the Analgesic advantage of the Opioid Remifentanil" may fully crush the theory upon which medical science has built its case, to date. Yet, this finding may also open the door to an entirely new way of treating disease.
Prominent researchers from the University of Oxford, University medical center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Cambridge University, and Technical University, Munich found that the extreme and most influential determining factor of either a drug treatment is, or isn't, effective is nothing less than the patient's own mind. Their research, published in February 16, 2011 in the medical journal, Science Translational Medicine. [Sci Transl Med 16 February 2011: Vol. 3, Issue 70, p. 70ra14, Doi: 10.1126/scitranslmed.3001244], removes any doubt that the placebo corollary is responsible for healing, not a drug treatment or even a surgical procedure.
In the study's abstract, the researchers state: "Evidence from behavioral and self-reported data suggests that the patients' beliefs and expectations can shape both therapeutic and adverse effects of any given drug." They discovered how divergent expectancies in patients alter the analgesic efficacy of a potent opioid (painkilling drug) in salutary volunteers by using brain imaging."
In this study, when test subjects were told that they were not receiving painkiller medications - even though they were - the medication proved to be fully ineffective. In fact, the explore showed the benefits of painkillers could be boosted or fully wiped out by manipulating the subjects' expectations, which basically means it's entirely up to the sick person either he gets relief, or not.
This particular explore also identified the regions of the brain that are affected by sick person expectation. "On the basis of subjective and objective evidence, we voice that an individual's prospect of a drug's corollary critically influences its therapeutic efficacy and that regulatory brain mechanisms differ as a function of expectancy," according to the study's findings. Now try telling that to your doctor the next time he hands you prescribe medication!
Obviously, this should have important consequences for sick person care and for testing new drugs, but I doubt that it ever will. There is no money to be made from telling patients they can heal themselves. Still, alternative and complementary forms of treatment may greatly advantage from incorporating these theory into their approaches.
Your Mind Does Count - More Than You May Think
Now let's look at some of the specifics of this bright research.
A group of salutary test patients who experienced the same intensity of continuous pain caused by heat application to their feet were asked to rate their pain levels on a scale of 1 to 100. All patients were attached to an intravenous drip so drugs could be administered to them without their knowledge.
The patients experienced pain at an midpoint of level of 66.
The first phase of the experiment complex giving the patients one of the most effective and potent medications, remifentanil, without their knowledge. Their rate of pain dropped to 55.
In the second phase, the patients were told that they were receiving an intravenously administered painkiller. With no doubt in the patients' mind that this was true, the pain score dropped to 39.
Then, without unquestionably altering the dose of the drug, the patients were told the painkiller had been discontinued altogether and to, therefore, expect pain to return; consequently, the pain score went back up to 64. Even though the patients still received remifentanil, they now experienced the same level of pain as they did at the starting of the experiment, when no drug was given to them.
Professor Irene Tracey, from Oxford University, told the Bbc: "It's phenomenal, it's unquestionably cool. It's one of the best analgesics we have and the brain's influence can either vastly growth its effect, or fully take off it." She additional pointed out that the study was conducted on salutary population who were subjected to pain for just a short period of time.
People with chronic conditions who have unsuccessfully tried many drugs would not be as responsive because their expectations were likely dampened too many times before. Consequently, they may effortlessly turn their own doubts (negative expectations) into a self-fulfilling prophesy of non-recovery. In other words, salvage or cure doesn't depend on the treatment, but rather on what the sick person believes it will, or will not, do for him.
"Doctors need more time for consultation and to explore the cognitive side of illness; the focus is on physiology not the mind, which can be a real roadblock to treatment," claimed Professor Tracey.
George Lewith, a professor of condition explore at the University of Southampton, poignantly stated that these findings call into quiz, the scientific validity of many randomized clinical trials: "It fully blows cold randomized clinical trials, which don't take into inventory expectation."
George Lewith is a person to take very seriously, given his impressive and impeccable narrative of achievements and contributions to the world of medical science. The University of Southampton awarded a personal chair to Dr. Lewith as Professor of condition Research. He has published over 200 peer recite papers and 17 books. The Times, in an narrative on September 6, 2008, included George Lewith in The Lifestyle 50, the newspaper's listing of the "top 50 population who influence the way we eat, rehearsal and think about ourselves."
You Are in fee of Your Brain
What made this new study so bright and important is that objective brain scans taken while the experiment also showed which regions of the brain were affected by the patients' subjective expectations.
The researchers found valuable changes in the neural operation in brain regions complex with the coding of pain intensity. inevitable expectancy effects of pain relief were linked with operation in the endogenous pain modulatory system, whereas negative expectancy effects linked with operation in the hippocampus and the medial frontal cortex. Having either a inevitable or a negative prospect of outcome from a particular treatment, therefore, alters brain chemistry and determines your body's ability to heal.
This is a quote taken from the first edition of my book, classic Secrets of condition and Rejuvenation (1995), which now makes more sense than ever: "The mechanism of placebo medical is centered in the confidence of the sick person that a drug, an operation, or a different kind of treatment is going to relax his pain or cure his illness. Deep trust or a sure feeling of salvage is all that the sick person has at his disposal to activate a medical response. Utilizing the previously described distinguished mind/body connection, the sick person may release natural opioids (morphine-type painkillers) from areas of the brain that are activated by inevitable concept processes. The corresponding neurotransmitters for pain relief are known as endorphins. Endorphins are about forty thousand times more distinguished than the strongest heroin."
Professor Anthony Jones, Salford Royal Hospitals Nhs Foundation Trust, has stated: "Work from our own lab and those of others indicates that expectations are a key driver to pain perception and to placebo analgesic effects. So this provides additional confirmation of that idea in relation to drug effects. This has been demonstrated previously in relation to nitrous oxide analgesic effects, but the current study provides good evidence that this phenomenon is not due to the field saying what they think the interpreter wants to hear."
Drug Studies Are Fraud
The implications of this study are profound and science-shattering. It seriously undermines the validity of all drug studies ever conducted because they did not consist of this crucial factor - the subjective prospect of the sick person or test field who takes the actual drug. To reiterate Dr. Lewith's words, "It blows them cold."
Simply having a placebo group for comparison can neither make a drug trial trustable and scientific, nor can it ascertain the effectiveness of the drug. Those subjects who receive the actual drug have similar subjective, unpredictable expectations as the members of the placebo group. Drug associates like to give the impression that the placebo corollary can only occur in the placebo group, not in the test field group. But since members of neither group initially know either they are getting the real drug or a 'dummy' drug, the study results are ultimately carefully by each person's prospect of useful outcome, regardless of the group to which he is assigned.
Even if a tested drug shows greater advantage than the placebo, this still doesn't prove that the drug is effective. To the contrary, it may merely show the placebo corollary is stronger in the drug group than in the placebo group - which is a big finding, in and of itself.
Principal Flaws in Drug Trials
Why would the placebo be stronger that the dummy drug in those participants that receive the actual drug? Well, since all trial participants hope they will receive the real medicine, not just a placebo pill, they will contact a significantly increased inevitable prospect the occasion they notice the side-effects they were told the drug might produce, such as constipation, diarrhea, headache, dizziness, nausea, headaches, dryness of mouth, etc. Realizing they are among the actual drug recipients because of this self-observation, their prospect of potential salvage boosts the drug's success score. Researchers claim that this is proof of effectiveness of the tested drug, and they give zero reputation to the now-elevated expectancy on the part of the participants.
While some of the tested subjects may be very hopeful and enthusiastic about receiving a new medicine, others who have tried many similar medications before, without reaping much, if any, benefit, may have a more reserved or even negative prospect about its benefits. Since sick person expectancy is very relevant, according to this new research, all previously conducted scientific studies that didn't inventory for sick person expectancy are misleading and must be thrown out as invalid. This almost applies to all double-blind control studies ever done.
Another calculate why clinical drug trials are so unscientific and fraudulent is that they are not conducted in a truly double-blind setting. All participants, regardless either of they receive the real drug or the placebo pill, are told that the study is for a definite condition. For example, a clinical trial may test a new drug to combat hypertension, lower blood sugar, or decrease cholesterol. This straightforward information, which is advertised while the trial recruitment campaign, already generates an prospect in the participants that, perhaps, the new experimental drug might help them improve their health. This hopeful prospect may, in fact, be the former calculate they enroll in the trial.
There has never been a clinical trial where participants were not told what drug treatment they could expect to receive. On the one hand, the researchers claim their study is fool-proof because participants won't know either they receive the drug or a placebo. On the other hand, they tell all the participants upfront that at least half of them can expect to receive a pharmaceutical drug to improve the definite condition they are suffering from.
In other words, at least 1 in every 2 participants may already contact a placebo corollary before the trial has even started.
Every clinical scientist knows that the mind's confidence in a drug or treatment can yield a medical response. This is the very calculate there is a placebo group in every clinical trial. Why, then, do scientists and doctors insist that only drugs can cure conditions?
There is a clear duplicate standard in medical research. If they are definite in that only drugs can cure and treat diseases, then why do they need to consist of a placebo group in their research?
Telling the participants that one-half of them will receive the experimental drug and the other half will just get a placebo creates a major uncertainty factor of varied, unpredictable expectations in the subjects, one that the explore doesn't inventory for. This is pseudo-science at its best, and outright fraud at worst.
The only other way to do an objective study would be to tell every participant that he/she will receive the real drug, but nobody unquestionably will. Instead, all participants will get a placebo. Then start a second phase with the same subjects at a different time, and now give them the real drug while telling them so. If findings from the above pain study are correct, then the subjects are most likely going to get the same results at both phases. If the findings are incorrect, then it will show that the researched medication has true benefits. This would be honest, scientific research.
Dishonest Practices
To preclude getting a poor success score for the tested drug, pharmaceutical associates typically instruct researchers to choose the youngest and healthiest subjects to test it against a targeted disease. However, this practice is both unrealistic and deceptive. In real life, most drugs are being prescribed to the more sick, weaker and older patients who are already less likely to muster inevitable expectations than younger, stronger and healthier patients can. When you are unquestionably sick, you are also much more likely to feel disheartened or depressed.
Drug associates know about this dirty little hidden and, therefore, refuse unquestionably sick or depressed population from participating in drug trials. Think of a time in your life when you suffered from influenza or other type of illness. You likely felt weak and lost interest in almost everything that regularly excited you. As we now know, you will need to be excited about a treatment (positive expectation) to reap genuine benefits from it, or rather, from the placebo response it can trigger in you.
Even with the drug associates succeeding in manipulating the outcome of the so-called explore in favor of a new drug, there all the time are a relatively large estimate of trials that show outright ineffectiveness of the same drug.
If a drug were truly effective, it would work for every person tested. But since sick person expectancy is a very changeable and unpredictable factor, some of these trials show that there are drug benefits, whereas others show there aren't any. Drug associates are legally permitted by the Federal Drug administration (Fda) to cherry-pick the 'good' trials and throw out the 'bad' ones.
When the explore is ultimately presented to the Fda and the medical journals for peer-review and publication, it will look like a valid scientific study. The explore paper carries the stamp of 'proof' of drug efficacy.
In truth though, all of the studies conducted in this way are fabricated, worthless, and potentially risky for the sick person population, important to the often serious consequences of side-effects, together with death. No wonder the Fda is compelled to pull numerous drugs off the shop each year because they are just too toxic and dangerous. Hundreds of thousands of Americans die each year, poisoned by these Frankenstein pharmaceuticals.
Bottom line, it is impossible to directly prove either a sick person improves his condition because he is taking a medical drug, or because he believes the treatment will make him better. However, this new pain explore clearly indicates the latter to be the case.
Danger of medical Diagnosis
There is other aspect to the new findings. If person goes to the doctor and receives a pathology for a serious or concluding illness, such as cancer or congestive heart failure, this 'negative diagnosis' may turn into the same self-fulfilling prophesy that the test subjects in the aforementioned study experienced when they were told the painkiller was discontinued, even though this wasn't the case. A pathology of such an illness can almost shut down any remaining medical abilities the body may still have, together with intrinsic hope.
The uncertainty of not knowing "what I have" is based on fear of the unknown, where I may expect the worst case scenario, such as dying from it. This negative expectation, which is regularly confirmed by the doctor's diagnosis, can shatter all hope. Hope is just other word for 'positive expectation.' Why is it so valuable for a doctor to take this proven medical occasion away from someone, plainly because "we don't want to give him 'false' hope"'? There is no false hope. If hope is there, it's a good thing. Hope can never be false. Telling the sick person that there is no hope can just be as disappointing at the point of a doctor's pathology and pathology as it can be when a cure ultimately does not come about.
Taking away hope is a crime committed against the patient. Hope can make the dissimilarity between dying from a concluding illness and recovering from it.
As can be expected, the mechanism to heal from pain, cancer, or a heart condition is almost destroyed by instilling some kind of panic or death fright in a patient. A person of authority, which a medical doctor unquestionably is, can pass on to the sick person his own misguided conviction that he (or she) suffers from a concluding cancer, even though there are many examples of patients who have recovered from it.
Yet, even if the doctor knew of an alternative formula that could be helpful and save the patient's life, he is legally prohibited from development such a recommendation.
If the sick person is already very vulnerable because of a preexisting condition, financial hardship, public isolation, depression, anxiety, emotional stress, etc., then it is relatively easy to convince this person that he is caught in a trap from which he cannot escape. The fearful prospect of death can have dire consequences and, as implied by this research, unquestionably preclude the sick person from recovering and surviving. In other words, the certainty of a pathology can turn out to be far worse than the uncertainty of an undiagnosed disease.
There are numerous examples that preserve this. It has been a medical difficulty for many decades why population can conveniently live with a large malignant lung tumor for many years, but then die within a few days after receiving the diagnosis. While the death certificates will blame cancer for their death, in reality it's the pathology of cancer that kills them. Death fright is about the strongest fight or flight situation one can experience. It shuts down the body's digestive functions and waste removal, prevents sleep, causes wasting and rapid weight loss, and triggers many other serious physical imbalances. Modern treatment is still so far removed from insight and applying the intricate relationship that exists between mind, body and spirit, that it cannot make any sense of these 'unexplainable' phenomena where patients die from the diagnosis, not the disease - or survive a 'terminal' pathology because their inevitable expectations are profoundly strong, garage and effective.
"Miracle" of Spontaneous Remission
The mind/body/spirit triad relationship is clearly demonstrated in the now thousands of cancer patients who contact spontaneous remissions of their cancers. explore has shown that the size of a tumor can be reduced dramatically within a few hours of holistic condition treatment, when the sick person is very motivated by personal development. Perceiving a spiritual purpose in the disease that affects them, can also be sufficient to achieve remission.
This regularly happens when the disease is no longer perceived as a threat, but as a blessing in disguise. In other words, instead of being helpless victims of a senseless disease, they become active participants in the process of becoming whole again. The prospect of being blessed by something they might have previously seen as a frightful curse evokes some of the most distinguished medical responses the body has at its disposal.
The mechanism of expecting, and subsequently experiencing, pain relief from a saline clarification placebo is no different than the mechanism that turns a big tumor to powder in less than a minute.
I once saw a live ultrasound image where a cancerous bladder tumor, the size of a grapefruit, fully disintegrated and vanished while a 15-second sound-energy-healing session by a group of Chinese Qigong masters. Of course, without the patient's hopeful and receptive prospect that medical would occur, nothing would happen. Nobody can enter your home as long as you keep the door closed.
Instead of instilling death fright in a patient, a doctor ought to help the sick person to institute hope-filled expectations that can then translate into the valuable biochemical responses in the brain and heart that are required for the patient's body to unquestionably and fully heal itself. On the other hand, telling the sick person that he (or she) is suffering from a concluding illness introduces a factor of expectancy that is undeniably capable of executing the doctor's unintended death sentence.
If the doctor or, even worse, a diagnostic engine like a Ct scanner (machines don't lie) passes a death sentence on a patient, it is the natural prospect of the sick person that the sentence will be carried out that unquestionably kills him, not the disease.
When feeling this vulnerable, patients often see their doctor as their savior, their God. If God tells me I am dying, then it must be true. Relinquishing one's power to person who plays God makes one a slave, where the prospect is one of worthlessness and dependency. Letting a diagnosis, or rather the negative interpretation of it, rule one's life, lies at the core of today's condition crisis.
Just the title of my book, Cancer is Not a Disease - It's a Survival Mechanism, has helped thousands of population restore their confidence in themselves and their bodies. Transforming a negative prospect into a inevitable one is what practicing treatment ought to be about. The aforementioned explore should be studied by every doctor and applied to every field of Modern medicine, but this would most unquestionably make most of Modern treatment obsolete.
Still, thanks to these great researchers, we now have the model to scientifically explicate that medical is largely up to the expectation, state of mind, and attitude of the patient, not necessarily to the doctor and his pharmaceutical treatments.
So far, most medical dogma has turned everything upside down. I sincerely hope, for the sake of the survival of humankind, that Modern treatment undergoes a revolution that will turn it all upside down again. I am encouraged to see there is some light at the end of the tunnel.
Expectations Shape Reality
Both negative and inevitable expectations can lead to very unusual events. Many population have heard about the studies that showed heart attacks occurring more often on Mondays, regularly at 9Am, to be more exact. It is presumed this is due to the improbable difficulties and stress that may occur while the work week. Also, fewer population die while the days before Christmas, and more population die right after Christmas.
Another phenomenon, discovered by the Yale School of public condition and the National institute of Aging, is that young population who have inevitable expectations about aging are less likely to have a heart charge or stroke when they grow older.
In a study on aging conducted at Yale and also Miami University, middle aged and elderly population lived seven years longer when they had a inevitable attitude about aging.
In a classical study, 100 individuals over 80 years of age were located in an environment that put them back 30 years in time - from old time music playing on the radio, to era-appropriate clothing. Within a few weeks all their physiological and biochemical markers of aging had dropped by an midpoint of 15 years. When they returned to their current homes and living environments, however, they 'aged forward' by 15 years in just one day.
In a piece posted on Cnn.com, Elizabeth Cohen, Cnn Senior medical Correspondent, wrote about the self-induced, spontaneous remission of cancer in David Seidler, who won an Oscar this year for best former screenplay for "The King's Speech." Mr. Seidler, age 73, suffered from bladder cancer and used a straightforward formula of visualization to fully disintegrate his large tumor in less than two weeks, just in time before his scheduled operation, much to his physician's shock.
There are unquestionably thousands of examples where imagination, expectation, visualization, perception, attitude, etc., have shown to manifest anyone is being seriously entertained by the mind. Mind-body treatment is not some kind of woo-woo or wishful thinking, it is true science, as the following explore additional confirms.
Would you believe that just finding at the photograph of a romantic partner is sufficient to significantly dull pain, in the same way that paracetamol or narcotics, such as cocaine, can? Well, a explore study by Stanford University published discovered just that.
In the study, which was published in the journal PloS One in October 13, 2010, (doi:10.1371), researchers took Mri scans of the brains of love-struck students who were asked to focus on photographs of partners while varying levels of heat pain were applied to their skin. On average, the pain reduction was reduced between 36 and 44 percent, according to neuroscientist Jarred Younger. Pain drugs don't achieve much great than that.
According to a narrative in the September 2006 issue of the Hospitalist, "many patients will only contact a 30%-50% reduction in pain relief." Besides, pharmaceutical painkillers can have side-effects, together with nausea, dizziness, somnolence, constipation, dry mouth, increased sweating, liver failure and death. In other words, you don't have to rely on drugs to get good pain relief.
In yet other study, published in the journal Psychological Science in November 2009, psychologists from the University of California Los Angeles studied 25 women and their boyfriends for a period of six months, subjecting them to different levels of pain.
While experiencing the pain, the women were told to either hold their boyfriend's hand or the hand of a male stranger, both of whom were hidden behind a curtain. The women experienced significantly less pain while keeping their partner's or a stranger's hand.
When asked to view a photograph of their boyfriend, or a photograph of a male stranger while being subjected to discomfort, the women experienced at least the same pain reduction. In fact, the relief was even greater when a stranger was involved. This means that pain relief doesn't necessarily involve love-induced analgesia. The feeling of closeness or security that the women improbable to receive from finding at their lover's picture, or touching someone's hand, is all that's needed for the brain to send out the valuable opiates that bring on the relief.
These studies are invaluable in that they show how medical is closely linked to how we feel. We are not robots. To heal from a cancer, we need the support, encouragement, and guarnatee from the world nearby us, so that we can generate the kind of (positive) expectations valuable for the medical to occur. A negative pathology or prognosis, threatening a person with "if you don't take this treatment you will die," or development him feel that he is a helpless victim of a terrible disease, won't help but may unquestionably be responsible for his declining condition or extreme demise.
Many pharmaceuticals only work because population expect them to work, not because they have any valuable biochemical corollary on the body. Without the confidence of receiving a substantive benefit, the brain will plainly block the medication from doing its job.
As we have seen in the first study, giving a person a painkiller while telling him it's not a painkiller, proved to be fully worthless. Mind power either overrides the potential advantage of the drug, or it triggers the same biochemical responses the drug is designed to produce. In other words, the mind tells the brain either or not to activate the biochemical responses valuable for medical to take place.
We know from brain explore that all medical in the body is regulated by the brain. This has repeatedly been confirmed by many studies, together with those on antidepressant drugs, which have consistently failed to outperform the placebo. What's so encouraging about all this is that we are in fee of our brain. The brain carries out our instructions in the form of beliefs and expectations, inevitable and negative, known and subconscious. In one expression, we are what we believe. So, perhaps, it's now time to turn the way we think about the power we have over our own medical ability.
study Reveals the curative Power of the Mind