[acb-diabetics] FW: newspaper

[Patricia LaFrance-Wolf]

-----Original Message-----
From: Fred Marin [mailto:fredemarin at gmail.com] 
Sent: Thursday, November 12, 2009 8:00 AM
To: Undisclosed-Recipient:;
Subject: newspaper

 

Experts: Placebo power behind many natural cures 

 

By Marilynn Marchione, Associated Press 

 

Created: 11/11/2009 05:46:15 PM PST

 

People looking for natural cures will be happy to know there is one. Two
words explain how it works: "I believe." 

 

It's the placebo effect - the ability of a dummy pill or a faked treatment
to make people feel better, just because they expect that it will. It's the
mind's
ability to alter physical symptoms, such as pain, anxiety and fatigue. 

 

In just the past few weeks, the placebo effect has demonstrated its healing
powers. In tests of a new drug to relieve lupus symptoms, about a third of
patients
felt better when they got dummy pills instead of the drug. 

 

The placebo effect looms large in alternative medicine, which has many
therapies and herbal remedies based on beliefs versus science. Often the
problems
they seek to relieve, such as pain, are subjective. 

 

"It has a pejorative implication - that it's not real, that it has no
medicinal value," said Dr. Robert Ader, a psychologist at the University of
Rochester
in New York who has researched the phenomenon. 

 

But placebos can have real and beneficial effects, he said. 

 

"Much of the results of certain alternative procedures are largely placebo
effects, unless you believe there are people who exert magical powers so
they
can hold their hands over your body and cure you of disease," Ader said.
"Make you feel better? That's entirely possible, especially if you believe
it."

 


The placebo effect accounts for about a third of the benefits of any
treatment - even carefully 

tested medicines, scientists say. This dates to a landmark report in 1955
called The Powerful Placebo. Viewed as groundbreaking, the analysis of
dozens
of studies by H.K. Beecher found that 32 percent of patients responded to a
placebo. 

 

Later studies found that dummy pills could raise pulse rates, blood pressure
and reaction speed when people were told they had taken a stimulant; the
opposite
occurred when people were told that a drug would make them drowsy. 

 

How does it work? Scientists do not always know, but there are many possible
ways. Brain imaging shows that beliefs ("I know these pills will help") can
cause biological changes and affect levels of chemical messengers and stress
hormones that signal pain or pleasure. 

 

Emotions, too, can trigger physical changes. Take the case of a child with
croup. Crying tightens the airways and makes it tougher to breathe. Many
people
believe that cool mist is helpful, but when it has been tested in hospital
studies with croup tents, it has not been found to help, said Dr. Owen
Hendley,
a pediatrician at the University of Virginia. 

 

Try it at home, though, and you may get a different result. 

 

"The child sits in the lap of the mother and the mother holds the mist maker
close to the child. The child settles down, the mother settles down. The
setting,
and the mother feeling that it is helping, makes everybody calmer," and the
child actually is able to breathe better, Hendley explained. 

 

If it were not for the placebo effect, "physicians would not be nearly as
successful as we are," said Dr. Thomas Schnitzer, a Northwestern University
arthritis
specialist. He helped lead a big study that found glucosamine and
chondroitin supplements were no better than dummy pills for arthritic knee
pain. 

 

Doctors sometimes exploit the placebo effect to help patients. One survey
found that many doctors admitted sometimes giving patients sugar pills or
drugs
or vitamins that would not really help their condition, in an effort to
trigger a placebo effect. 

 

In Baltimore, the University of Maryland Medical Center's shock trauma
center is offering some patients Reiki therapy, which claims to heal through
invisible
energy fields manipulated by a special "master." The hospital's anesthesia
chief, Dr. Richard Dutton, says it is self-hypnosis and compares it to
Lamaze
classes that teach pregnant women breathing exercises to take their minds
off the pain of labor. 

 

Roy A. Armstrong's family agreed to it after he was injured in a motorcycle
crash last year. The 39-year-old suffered cardiac arrest and had many broken
bones. As he lay tethered to a breathing machine, nurse Donna Audia and a
partner circled his bed, waving their arms through the air and touching his
head
while humming and making tunes by rubbing a crystal bowl with a wand. 

 

Armstrong was too sedated to remember anything, but "I think in some way it
helped him to get better," his wife said. He is still recovering through
physical
therapy. 

 

Dutton said: "You can call it a placebo effect, you can call it a chicken
soup effect. It's all about creating the right mental state in the person.
The
patients tell us they seem to like it. And in pain management, that's the
whole goal. If 30 percent of your patients get better on placebo, why not
give
it to them?" 

 

Swear-by-it stories and anecdotal reports of benefit are one thing. Proving
a treatment helps is quite another. Many alternative medicine studies have
not
included a placebo group - people who unknowingly get a dummy treatment so
its effect can be compared. 

 

Acupuncture is especially hard to research. Positive studies tend to lack
comparison groups that have been given a sham treatment. Or they are often
done
in China, where the treatment is an established part of health care. 

 

One U.S. study found that true acupuncture relieved knee arthritis pain
better than fake acupuncture, in which guide tubes were placed but no
needles were
inserted. But a European study involving twice as many patients and using a
more realistic sham procedure found the fake treatment to be just as good.
The conclusion: Pain relief was due to the placebo effect. 

 

Advertisements and testimonials from product users can encourage a placebo
effect. The Federal Trade Commission last summer reached a settlement over
advertising
claims for Airborne, a product "invented by a teacher" that was supposed to
ward off germs spread through the air. 

 

"Products like Airborne are what we call `credence products.' That's a fancy
word for saying it's difficult or impossible for consumers to determine if
the product has done anything for them," said commission lawyer Rich
Cleland. "Part of that is because of the placebo effect. Part of that is
because people
don't want to believe they've been ripped off." 

 

Barbara Domen, a former kindergarten teacher in Caswell Beach, N.C., said
she was prone to colds and used Airborne six or seven times a year when she
flew
on planes. 

 

"It worked for me," although it could be because since she retired, "I'm
away from all the germs," she said. She skipped it on one flight and caught
a terrible
cold. 

 

"Maybe it's psychological, but I think I'll continue to use it," she said. 

 

Some placebo effects are due to conditioning, or ascribing benefits to
something you did that may in fact have played no role in your improvement.
Insomnia
is an example, said Michael Perlis, a psychologist and neuroscientist at the
University of Pennsylvania. 

 

If you have trouble sleeping one night, your body's need for sleep makes it
very likely you'll sleep well the next night. If you take a sleeping pill,
you
think you slept well because of the pill, he said. 

 

Do any herbal remedies work for insomnia? "Not that I know of," Perlis said.
"But all of them have potential to be useful with time. It has nothing to do
with them - it has everything to do with conditioning."

 



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