Placebos Can Help

PLACEBO

(Faith Healing)

Pla-ce’-bo (plå-sē’-bő), n. [Latin, “I shall please.”]  Med. A medicine, esp. an inactive one, given merely to satisfy a patient.

                                                            Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, copyright, 1961

-                      a medication prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on his disorder.

Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, copyright, 1979

The mention of a placebo makes people smile the smile of a shared secret.  It connotes a beneficial little trick pulled on the not-really-sick.  A pill is given tricking the complainer into thinking something truly medicinal has been prescribed.  So believing many have been fooled into feeling better.  At least that’s how we have in the past thought about the placebo.  Recent research indicates there’s much more to it than we’ve supposed.

Apparently when the placebo is taken by some trusting patients, it actually causes the body to heal itself.  When the sick or hurt person with confidence in the medical profession, medicine, scientific effectiveness, pops the placebo pill into his system, the body produces chemicals called endorphins.  One of these is a pain killer more powerful than morphine.  Pain is then reduced or eliminated by the body’s own chemicals, the production of which was stimulated by the placebo taken in faith.

The body heals itself.  The self-healing capacity of our human system is being stressed more and more by medical sophisticates.  The placebo research underscores it in a striking way.  It shows that pulling the right trigger can initiate self-healing.

Throughout all of history healing has occurred in ways that defy modern science’s self-confidence.  While some may come straight from God, many others may come from Him through the mysterious miracles of faith in a practitioner, an herb, a touch, an incantation that triggers the self-healing potential of the human body.

If the trusting patient can be helped by a placebo in the form of a medicine it becomes obvious that faith in the healing power of God, or the hand of a praying person, or a drop of olive oil, could also release, or speed up the healing powers created in the person.

Primitive people have always responded to “unscientific” healing ventures.  Civilized Americans who have trusted science above all could hardly profit from anything but the productions of laboratories.  As we see the scientific evidence of the body’s self-healing capacities even we modern people may find ways in which faith can heal.  We may begin again to ask that the elders lay their hands on us, pray over us, and maybe even put the oil on us, believing with scientific basis that such love, care, attention, may trigger the healing process God has created within us.