Dealing With Headaches

When you read about medical studies on new medicines, or evaluating the effectivemness of alternative therapies, you hear about this “placebo” thingy a lot. I’m sure you know what it is. It is a fake medicine or therapy, designed to look like the real deal. The human guinea-pig is even told “Hey, this is suppossed to be the bee’s knees,” in order to get the effect to kick in.

The curious thing is not why placebos are used. It’s that they can be suprisingly effective in the short term — even as much or more than the new medicine being tested!

What’s All That About?

The mind is an incredibly annoying thing at times. Henry Ford said, “Whether you bel;ieve you can do a thing or not, you’re right.” Placebos have such a startlingly high initial effect because , in the words of Dr. Isadore Rosenfeld, MD:

Any health measure or intervention dispensed to a randomly selected group of individulas who are assured that it will “work” may result in improvement as often as half the time.

In other words, just by trying a new medicine or therapy, you may get some measureable pain relief because your hope and attitude help reduce the pain. Weird, isn’t it? And yet, quite welcome to anyone who suffers from pain.

Not A Cure All

There are limits to the power of placebos. There (sadly) hasn’t been a proven placebo yet that could spontaneously put cancer into remission or regrow a lost limb. But placebos can give releif to aches and pains, digestive problems, chest pains, skin conditions, headaches and migraines.

And, as pointed out in a previous post, there is a very good reason why we experience pain. It means the body is telling us “Stop! There’s something wrong! If you don’t stop, things’ll get worse! I can promise you that!”

For example, the afore mentioned Dr. Rosenfeld talks about a placebo study for angina in his best selling Dr. Rosenfeld’s Guide To Alternative Medicine. One patient lost all pain on the placebo alone. However, his ECG tests still showed a big problem. The patient, not feeling any pain, began resuming a normal activity level. Unfortunately, this could wind up killing him with a sudden heart attack, so he was taken off the placebo and told what was going on.

So, although a placebo lives up to it’s name, (Latin for “I shall please”), it’s more for a one-night stand rather than a committed relationship. For some of us, though, we’re thankful to get whatever we can get!

Hope this helps.