On Suggestion
In the paper recently was a small article about a
woman who had an operation while under hypnosis. Instead of an anesthetic she
was hypnotised to feel no pain and apparently it was very successful. What is
surprising is that after over 70 years of using hypnosis as an anesthetic this
is still newsworthy. What is more surprising is that it is not more widely used.
The dangers of general anesthetics have been well documented and this is particularly
so in older patients. Probably around 90% of people can be hypnotised to the
extent that they could be anaesthetised. Even if this were less than 50% it
would still be worth pursuing. Not only do hypnotised patients feel no pain
but also they are able to control bleeding, are completely conscious and recover
immediately from the effects.
On the subject of suggestion is the well-documented placebo effect. A placebo is something given by a physician, usually a pill, that the patient is told will have a certain effect although in fact it has no physical effect. Placebos are used in double-blind experiments. When a new drug is tried as to its efficacy, half the subjects are given the trial drug and the other half are given a placebo, for example a harmless pill that looks identical to the trial drug. No one, neither the patient nor the person administering the drug, knows whether what is being given is the drug or a placebo. The reason for this is that when a patient is given ANY drug there is an improvement and the idea is to deduce how much better the trial drug is than the placebo. This raises the question: ‘how effective is a placebo?’
H. K. Beecher's seminal paper "The Powerful Placebo" (Beecher 1955) is among the most frequently cited and was undoubtedly responsible for the double-blind study design having been adopted as the universal standard. Beecher reported on twenty-six studies and arrived at an average placebo response rate of 32.5 percent. (www.csicop.org)
In fact, some studies put this figure much higher. So we have a drug that is mainly harmless, with no side effects and that has a success rate of over 30% (over 70% for some conditions). This is far better than many ‘successful’ drugs. Sceptics attribute the success of alternative remedies to the placebo effect (while at the same time denying that many of the remedies have any success), while ignoring that this is also true for many established pharmaceuticals. In fact, many doctors will prescribe something simply because they know the patient expects it as a placebo. It's common for doctors to prescribe antibiotics for viral diseases even though their training and medical texts tell them that this is useless – in fact, worse than useless as over prescribing of antibiotics causes drug-resistant bacteria to be produced.
