Placebo Effect
Rashid Kapadia
Speaker, Project Manager, Engineer, Consultant, and Author of Necessary Bridges
A Performance Tip. Originally posted in April 2018
The placebo effect is one of the most perplexing phenomena is science.
From the book BOUNCE:
QUOTE.
In 1944, Allied forces launched an offensive foray at Anzio in northern Italy during World War II. It turned out to be a disastrous maneuver, with American forces trapped in the caves of Pozzoli for over a week. Henry Beecher, a young doctor from Harvard, was the man responsible for treating the influx of injured American soldiers at a makeshift field hospital at the beachhead.
Such was the scale of casualties that Beecher soon ran out of anesthetic. Confronted with a soldier with gaping wounds and needing to operate quickly, he therefore instructed his nurse to administer a saltwater injection instead of morphine. The patient assuming that a proper dose of anesthesia had been administered, lay back in preparation for his operation. What happened next would come to shake the medical world.
Beecher found that the soldier was not merely comforted by the injection of salt water; he was able to tolerate the agonies of surgery as well as if he had been injected with the “real” anesthetic. Over the next few weeks Beecher was to replicate the results with dozens of wounded soldiers, each of whom could bear, with seemingly miraculous stoicism, the trauma of surgery with nothing more than salt water running through their veins.
When he returned, Beecher wrote a paper called “The Powerful Placebo.”
But Beecher was not the first doctor to have been astonished by the placebo effect. Theodor Kocher, a Swiss surgeon, successfully performed 1,600 thyroidectomies without anesthesia in Berne in the 1890s after taking careful steps to ensure that his patients believed that they had been fully anesthetized.
According to journalist and doctor Ben Goldcare, “Surgeons from before the invention of anesthesia often described how some patients could tolerate the cutting through muscle, and saw cutting through bone, perfectly awake, and with our even clenching their teeth.
UNQUOTE
Source: Bounce by Matthew Syed
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