You Are the Placebo: Making Your Mind Matter

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You Are The Placebo (1)

— P
ART
I
gives you all the detailed knowledge and background information you need to be able to understand what the placebo eﬀect is and how it operates in your brain and body, as well as how to create the same kind of miraculous changes in your own brain and body all by
yourself, by thought alone.
Chapter 1
starts oﬀ the book by sharing some incredible stories demonstrating the amazing power of the human mind. Some of these tales relate how people’s thoughts have healed them, and others show how people’s thoughts have actually made them sick (and sometimes even hastened their death. You’ll read about a man who died after hearing he had cancer, even though his autopsy revealed that he’d been misdiagnosed a woman plagued by depression for decades who improved dramatically during an antidepressant drug trial, despite the fact that she was in the group receiving a placebo and a handful of veterans hobbled by osteoarthritis who were miraculously cured by fake knee surgery.
You’ll even read some startling stories about voodoo curses and snake handling. My purpose in sharing these dramatic stories is to show the wide range of what the human mind is capable of doing all on its own,
without any help from modern medicine. And hopefully, it will lead you to the question How is that possible?”
Chapter 2
gives a brief history of the placebo, tracing accounts of related scientiﬁc discoveries from the s (when a Viennese doctor used magnets to induce what he thought were therapeutic convulsions) all the way through the modern day, as neuroscientists solve exciting mysteries about the intricacies of how the mind works. You’ll meet a doctor who developed techniques of hypnotism after arriving late for an appointment only to ﬁnd his waiting patient mesmerized by a lamp ﬂame, a World
War II surgeon who successfully used saline injections as an analgesic on wounded soldiers when he ran out of morphine, and early psychoneuroimmunology researchers in Japan who switched poison-ivy leaves with harmless leaves and found that their test group reacted more to what they were told they were experiencing than to what they actually did experience.
You’ll also read about how Norman Cousins laughed himself to health;
how Harvard researcher Herbert Benson, MD, was able to reduce cardiac patients risk factors for heart disease by ﬁguring out how Transcendental
Meditation worked and how Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti,
M.D., PhD, primed subjects who had been given a drug, and then switched the drug fora placebo—and watched the brain continue to signal the production of the same neurochemicals the drug produced without interruption. And you’ll also read a striking new study that’s a
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real game changer It shows that irritable bowel syndrome (IBS) patients were able to dramatically improve their symptoms by taking placebos—
even though they knew full well that the medication they were given was a placebo, not an active drug.

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