I watched a shocking video this week. It is a talk on TedMed by Alia Crum, a PhD psychologist at Stanford University who runs the Mind & Body Lab there. Take a look:

In this video, she succinctly summarizes the latest research on the role that placebos play in healing as well as illness. Placebo is a medical term that means an inert substance, usually a pill filled with rice flour or sugar, given to a clinical trial participant to see how it does against the drug being tested for its effectiveness. But in real day-to-day terms placebos have come to mean the power that our minds and beliefs have to heal ourselves as opposed to the power we give to drugs and other medical interventions.

The success of clinical testing for a drug company, that is, what makes the drug trial successful and allows a product to go to market, is that it performs better than a placebo. For example, if a drug makes 45% of the trial participants feel better and 40% of the trial participants feel better with a placebo, that trial is considered a “success,” and the drug is then approved and allowed to sell.

In her video, Crum makes the point that only 10% of the drugs ever tested have performed better than placebos. This means that 90% of the time, our belief that we are being healed, and our body’s own healing power, outperforms the drug being tested. I have long been an advocate of the power of belief in healing, but this statistic shocked even me. What’s more, the drug companies take all the credit for whatever percentage natural healing has in boosting their results!

The video is only 15 minutes long, and it is well worth watching. It is packed with good information, including:

-       How a person feels about the treatment they are given dramatically affects how their body reacts, both positively and negatively.

-       A doctor’s warmth and engaging attention can improve a patient’s treatment outcome. Patients also didn’t respond as well when they were being treated by someone who was purposefully mislabeled as a “student” doctor.

-       The placebo effect causes actual physiological changes in our bodies. Those can lead to better or worse results depending on a person’s belief, whether they are related to treatment, prevention, or illness-causing beliefs.

-       These physiological effects, which prompt the body to heal, are part of the complex healing process in all of us. Much of modern medicine dismisses this reaction as “just a placebo.”

-       Crum argues that rather than treat placebo effects as anti-science villains, we should harness their power to treat and prevent disease.

Another great read on this subject is Cure: A Journey into the Science of Mind Over Body by Jo Marchant. Marchant was a skeptical science writer who, after she researched the subject and realized its power, came to believe that the placebo effect and belief deserve a much bigger role in treatment and prevention of illness.

In my own practice I have encountered a vast “underground” within me that affects how I feel and what I can do. My belief in my own self-worth and the power of healing in my body are probably my biggest allies in my later-life health journey. You can find more discussion on placebos, and several examples of how I have incorporated belief into my own healing, in my book, A Life Yet to Live. LINK I am not saying that this is the only way to practice good health, but that the healing power of belief needs to be taken into consideration along with both traditional and functional medical care.

Here’s a simple example featuring my youngest daughter, Lollie, of the power of positive thinking. She was having trouble learning to ride a bike when she was 5 or 6. We were practicing on a long driveway in front of the building where we lived. She struggled to master all the pieces that go into riding a bike: balancing, steering, and pedaling—all at the same time! It wasn’t working for her. At one point I asked her to close her eyes, take a deep breath, and create a picture in her imagination of riding the bike down the driveway with ease and grace and to stay with that picture until she was ready to try again. On the very next try it all came together. She had mastered the art of bike riding and never looked back.

So, when you think about your health, especially your health in later life, make sure what you believe and how you feel about yourself and your life support what you do to keep your health as robust as possible. Learn more about belief and placebos and see how much these concepts and practices resonate with you. Will it make a difference if you believe your later life will be robust and disease free? Does believing that you will fall ill or be less mobile increase the chances of those issues happening? I would yes, that both of those attitudes could have an effect on my health. Staying positive about my health outlook, as well as myself and my life, is a vital pillar of mastering my later life.