Dr Michael Mosely is a great TV doctor who describes himself as being “a big fan of trying to find alternatives to medication”. You may have recently watched him on the BBC2 Horizon programme on the 4th October 2018. This episode was titled “The Placebo Experiment: can my brain cure my body?”. It was a fascinating programme that looked into how the placebo effect works. He joined placebo expert, Dr Jeremy Howick at Oxford University who has designed an experiment to see if back pain can be cured by the power of the mind. As we know about 80% of people will experience back in their lives and so is a very common problem and something I obviously see everyday.
The experiment looked at 100 random people from Blackpool who all had back pain; all the people were told they were going to be given real pain killers or a placebo – in fact they were all given fakes! Three weeks later they were all asked how they felt and how much pain were they in. A lot of the 100 people felt amazing despite not taking real pain killers.
Dr Mosley explained that “What is believed to happen is if you think you’re getting a real pill, the brain releases chemicals, which naturally suppress pain.” Physically changes also happened in other parts of the body that caused anti-inflammatory effects which is why back pain is helped.
Dr Mosely concluded that the one characteristic that all the people who responded to the placebo effect was positivity and they were open to the experience.
Whether its a pain killer you are trying or an operation or a new experience that you are apprehensive about, think: “this is absolutely going to work, it’s going to be terrific.”
If you missed this episode and are able to catch up with Dr Mosely’s Horizon programme then I would absolutely recommend it!