New Study Indicates New Understanding of Placebo Efficacy
Can a sugar pill help you feel better, even when you know it’s just a placebo? Groundbreaking new studies indicate just that.
A placebo is defined as an “inert preparation prescribed more for the mental relief of the patient than for its actual effect on a disorder.” It has been used in most modern clinical studies, to measure the effects of a drug against what has been deemed “no treatment.” However, starting in the 1950s, researchers started to see the power of the placebo in healing the body, and today cutting-edge science is showing just how.
Former organic chemist David Hamilton has been researching the placebo effect for years. He wrote about it in his book “How Your Mind Can Heal Your Body.”
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New Dr. Joe Dispenza Study Shows Meditators’ Blood Resists Illness
A cutting-edge, new study by Dr. Joe Dispenza is showing the connection between meditation and our body’s capacity to heal itself.
“Our nervous system tends to be the greatest pharmacy in the world,” Dr. Joe Dispenza said.
Dr. Joe Dispenza has spent a career, as he puts it, “demystifying the mystical” to that end. After leading week-long meditation retreats for years, he noticed miraculous changes among the participants, with some even claiming to have long-standing afflictions cured, seemingly by meditation alone. So, he decided to put it to scientific testing and partnered with the University of California San Diego biology department.
They tested advanced meditators, novice meditators, and a control group, and the results have been fascinating.
“We started looking closely at cellular function, and we started measuring thousands of cellular metabolites that determine whether a cell is in growth and repair or a cell is in breakdown,” Dr. Joe Dispenza said. “At the end of seven days, I get a call from our senior research analyst and he says ‘We have some really compelling things to show you,’ and we saw dramatic changes in the biology of advanced meditators. So when we started looking at the cellular function, we noticed along with the change in cellular function (for those people that watch Rewired) there was this arousal that was taking place in the person’s brain and in their nervous system. The arousal wasn’t pain, the arousal wasn’t fear, and the arousal wasn’t anger or aggression — which typically causes an arousal from the sympathetic nervous system — the person was reporting an arousal and the only word they could use was ‘ecstasy’ or ‘bliss,’ they had made some connection with something. So when we captured the blood of these people and when they made some type of connection, we noticed some really powerful effects in their blood plasma.”
But when they took the blood samples of these meditators into the lab they were in for a big surprise.
