During the Second World War, Dr Henry Beecher, an American doctor operating in Anzio, Italy, ran out of morphine. He started injecting his patients – some of whom had terrible injuries – with a harmless saline solution. To his surprise, there was little difference in the results. The soldiers thought they’d received morphine, and the salted water, acting as a placebo, seemed capable of suppressing quite excruciating pain even among those recovering from amputations. But of course, it wasn’t really the saline solution doing this. It was the human mind.
Stories of the incredible power of the mind to cure the body are not simply found in the literature of pain-killing and drugs. In the late 1990s, for instance, a Swedish hospital operated on 81 people who had a condition in which the heart muscles thicken abnormally. Typically, some sufferers experience only mild effects, while others become seriously ill and die. A common cure is to insert a pacemaker, which is exactly what happened to the 81 patients. The twist was that for half of them, the pacemakers weren’t turned on! And yet they all experienced the same kind of improvements (though to a slightly lesser extent in the case of those whose pacemakers were switched off): less chest pain, dizziness, shortness of breath and heart palpitation.
Readers of the previous chapter may be suspicious of the small sample size in this example. So here’s another case from the placebo literature. In a large group of men, aged 30 to 64, who had suffered a heart attack during the previous three months, 1,103 were given a potent drug (clofibrate) and 2,789 a placebo. The researchers followed their progress for at least five years and found almost no difference in survival rates between the two groups: 20% of those on the real drug and 20.9% of those taking the placebo died. The scientists also noticed that those who took their pills regularly had better survival rates. Of patients on the active drug who took more than 80% of the prescribed dose only 15.7% had died five years later (compared to 22.5% of those who took less than 80%). However, the same thing happened in the placebo group. Of those who took more than 80% of the fake medicine, only 16.4% had died five years later (compared to 25.8% of those who took less than 80%).
© Spyros Makridakis, Robin Hogarth and Anil Gaba, 2009