The Science Behind the Law of Attraction Magazine June, 2016 | Page 17

Have you ever wondered why a certain percentage
of people can be administered a sugar pill, get a
saline injection, or receive a false treatment, and in
the process accept, believe, and surrender to the
thought? without any analysis? that they are
receiving the real substance or actual treatment?
What actually occurs as a result of the thought is
that their autonomic nervous system makes the
exact pharmacy of chemicals that they believe they
need. It makes you wonder: If the substance, for
example, is nothing more than a sugar pill, is it the
inert material that?s
doing the healing or is it
the body?s innate ability
to heal? The placebo
effect is one way to
describe how many of us
can heal by thought
alone.
As high as 81% of
patients who are given
the placebo in
depression studies
respond as well as the subjects who are on
anti-depression medications. (footnote # 1) The
brain scans that have been taken of the patients
verify that these people weren?t just feeling
well? they were well. The people who had
improved on the placebos hadn?t just imagined
feeling better, they actually changed their
brain-wave patterns. Over the course of the study,
the EEG recordings taken so faithfully showed a
significant increase in activity in the prefrontal
cortex, which in depressed patients typically has
very low activity. (footnote # 2) The placebo effect
was not only altering their minds, but also bringing
about real physical changes in their biology. Some

patients even reported feeling nausea, which is
notable because nausea is one of the common
side effects of the drugs? which they knew
ahead of time? they were being tested for.
Those common side effects might have even
influenced them to embrace the thought that
they surely must have gotten the active drug,
especially if the depression was lifting and
they were experiencing side effects. What was
actually occurring, however, was that they were
making their own pharmacy of
anti-depressants just by
thinking that they were
getting better. In other
words, the subjective
changes weren?t just in
their mind? objective
changes occurred in their
brain. Without taking any
drug or doing anything
differently, by the end of
the study the placebo
subjects had a different
brain. Another
groundbreaking study showed for the first time
that a placebo could trigger the release of
endorphins (the body?s natural painkillers), just
as certain active drugs do. In the research
experiment, Jon Levine, M.D., Ph.D., of the
University of California, San Francisco, gave
placebos instead of pain medication to 40
dental patients who had just had their wisdom
teeth removed. (footnote # 3) Because the
patients thought they were getting the real
medicine that would indeed relieve their pain,
most reported significant relief. But when the
researchers gave the patients an antidote to
morphine called naloxone, which chemically
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