Power of the MIND: Patients cured by sham surgeries because they think the surgeon solved their problem

Scientists have long been aware of what is known as the “placebo effect,” which refers to a treatment that has a positive therapeutic impact on a patient, even though the treatment or medication they received wasn’t actually real. Drugs.com notes that placebo effects have been noted in as many as 40 percent of patients in research studies. But did you know that even surgery is subject to this effect, and that patients can actually be cured by totally fake operations?

The U.K.’s Daily Mail reports that thousands of patients are possibly undergoing invasive surgical procedures for nothing, because the benefits they perceive are placebo effects rather than actual results of the surgery.

Many different types of surgery may be putting patients at unnecessary risk, including keyhole knee surgery, gastric balloons for the morbidly obese and arthritis operations. Surgery for endometriosis, a debilitating condition which can cause infertility and extremely painful periods for women, is another type of surgery in which the results seem to rest more in the mind of the patient than in the surgery itself. [Discover more about the power of the mind at Psychiatry.news]

Other possibly useless surgeries include vertebroplasty, which involves fusing vertebrae by injecting liquid bone cement into the spine; migraine implants; and the removal of damaged bone in osteoarthritis patients.

Studies have found that patients who undergo sham surgeries and are never actually operated on can recover virtually as well as those who really do have the surgery. It would seem that people’s minds are so powerful that just expecting a procedure to work is enough to do the job. [RELATED: Did you know that surgical removal of wisdom teeth is often just a sham?]

Andrew Carr, a professor of orthopedic surgery at the University of Oxford, believes that for certain surgeries patients should be advised about this placebo effect. He notes that the hospital environment, medical professionals being dressed in a certain way, and the fact that the patient is put under anesthesia, combine to “create a phenomenal placebo effect.”

“The correct thing has got to be to do the trials, and not to continue doing operations where we don’t know whether or not there’s a strong placebo component or an entire placebo component, because that means that tens or hundreds of thousands of patients are having unnecessary operations,” Professor Carr noted.

Of course, getting surgeons who have been performing a certain procedure for many years to accept that it is essentially unnecessary can be very difficult. Nonetheless, it is important that they recognize which procedures can be avoided to spare their patients unnecessary and even dangerous surgical interventions.

For a study published in the British Medical Journal, researchers reviewed multiple clinical trials to compare true surgical results versus placebo. They found that in 39 out of 53 trials there was an improvement among the placebo control group. In 27 of the studies they found that results were no different for the placebo group when compared to the surgical group. Interestingly, in 18 of the trials serious adverse effects were reported among the control group, which really illustrates the power of the mind.

In 2014, the New England Journal of Medicine published a study which once again proved the power of sham surgeries. Participants in the trial were divided into two groups; one group received knee surgery to repair a torn meniscus, while the second group only thought they had received the surgery. All the patients were put under anesthesia, and the surgical team went to great lengths to pass instruments and do whatever was necessary to make sure that even patients who could hear what was going on would not know that they were not truly being operated on. Amazingly, both groups recovered from their injuries equally well.

So, next time your surgeon wants to operate on you, it might be worth doing a little extra research and finding out if the surgery is truly necessary.

Sources:

Drugs.com

DailyMail.co.uk

BMJ.com

NEJM.org

Humans INTUITIVELY avoid others who carry disease, even before they become conscious of symptoms

The next time your instincts tell you to avoid someone, it may just be your brain protecting your system from contagious diseases. A new study has found that the human brain can detect diseases in other people even before symptoms manifest, ScienceDaily.com reported. The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), found that the human brain is better at reading signals and discovering early-stage diseases than scientists previously thought. More than that, the study also found that humans act on the information, showing less preference for people infected with disease.

In carrying out the research, the scientists focused on two groups of participants. They activated the immune response in the first group of participants, injecting them with harmless sections of bacteria. They then developed symptoms of disease, such has tiredness, pain, and fever. The symptoms only lasted for a few hours, during which time photos, videos, and smell samples were recorded from the participants.

The smells, images, and videos were then shown to the second group of participants, along with samples and recordings from healthy people without symptoms. The second group of participants were asked to rate how much they liked the people, as an MR scanner tracked their brain activity. Afterwards, the second group of participants were asked to identify based solely on the photographs which of the people looked sick, which they thought were attractive, and which they would want to socialize with.

The results showed that there was a remarkable difference in the way people respond to healthy people compared to sick people, with participants showing a preference for healthy people.

“The study shows us that the human brain is actually very good at discovering this and that this discovery motivates avoidance behavior,” lead investigator Mats Olsson, professor at Karolinska Institutet’s Department of Clinical Neuroscience.

“Common sense tells us that there should be a basic behavioural repertoire that assists the immune system. Avoidance, however, does not necessarily apply if you have a close relationship with the person who is ill,” Olsson explained. “For instance, there are few people other than your children who you’d kiss when they have a runny nose. In other words, a disease signal can enhance caring behavior in close relationships. With this study, we demonstrate that the brain is more sensitive to those signals than we once thought.”

There are many ways that the brain protects the rest of the body from being physically compromised. Apart from alerting the body to potential threats (i.e people carrying diseases), the brain can also impact how the body recovers once a disease is already contracted. There are studies that show that the simple act of positive thinking can help speed up recovery from surgery and even manage serious diseases such as cancer, heart disease, and AIDS, PsychCentral.com said.

Scientists suspect that the healing powers of positive thinking go back to the strong connection between the mind and the immune system. For instance, one study showed that first year law students who expressed optimism at the start of the school year were found to have better-functioning immune system cells than the students who were worried. Conversely, pessimism can trigger the release of stress hormones in the bloodstream.

Evidently, the power of the brain over the rest of the body is unparalleled, with new discoveries of its effects on the body coming up every day.

Get more updates like this on Healing.news.

Sources include:

ScienceDaily.comPsychCentral.com

Scientists shocked to discover the human body is full of “mini brains” that function without using the Central Nervous System

The human body’s peripheral nervous system may have the capacity to interpret its environment and regulate pain, a recent animal study revealed. A team of researchers at the University of Leeds and the Hebei Medical University in China examined ganglia cells in mice and rats for five years and found that nerve cells in the ganglia, a collection of nodules in the peripheral nervous system, can exchange information with one another using a signaling molecule called gamma-Aminobutyric acid. This process was previously believed to be restricted in the central nervous system. The researchers also found that when exposed to pain stimuli, ganglia cells appeared to communicate with each other and regulate signals that were being sent to the central nervous system.

“We found the peripheral nervous system has the ability to alter the information sent to the brain, rather than blindly passing everything on to the central nervous system…When our research team looked more closely at the peripheral system, we found the machinery for neuronal communication did exist in the peripheral nervous system’s structure. It is as if each sensory nerve has its own ‘mini-brain’, which to an extent, can interpret incoming information,” said lead researcher Professor Nikita Gamper.

The findings may have potential use in the development of new types of pain medication in the future. This would entail the possibility of developing non-addictive and non-drowsy drugs, which will target peripheral nervous system. Safe therapeutic doses of these drugs may also be higher, which would indicated increased efficacy. However, researchers said further research is needed to better understand how exactly these mini-brains operate. (Related: Learn more about medical breakthroughs and other similar articles at Cures.news).

“This dramatically changes our understanding of pain medication because in theory it is now possible to target drugs at the peripheral nervous system which could widen the type of treatments available,” said Professor Xiaona Du, the study’s co-author.

The findings were published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation. 

Mini brains in the peripheral nervous system may challenge previous knowledge

According to Professor Du, the recent discovery may challenge the Gate Control Theory of Pain. The theory, initially developed by Ronald Melzack and Patrick Wall, indicates that perceived pain depends on the complex interaction of the central and peripheral nervous systems as they process pain stimuli on their own. In the event of an injury, nerves located in the damaged tissue send pain signals that flow along the peripheral nerves to the spinal cord and ultimately to the brain. However, before they reach the brain, these pain signals go through nerve gates in the spinal cord, which open and close depending on certain factors. More intense pain is felt when these nerve gates open. On the other hand, pain may not even be felt when the nerve gates are closed

However, data from the recent study may prove the mechanism to be more complicated. According to the study, the transfer of information to the central nervous system might be subject to another nerve gate. The experts also inferred that it could be another transmission process controlled by the peripheral nervous system this time. “Peripheral nerves have the ability to dial up or down the signal which goes through these gates to the brain. Importantly, we believe that these gates can be exploited for therapeutic control of pain,” Prof. Gamper added.

Outside expert Lishuang Cao, Head of Membrane Physiology at GlaxoSmithKline R&D in Shanghai, said more studies are needed to gain insight on the role of GABA in conditions such as inflammatory, neuropathic, and chronic pain. The expert also highlighted the need to determine whether a similar mechanism is present in the human body’s peripheral nervous system.

Sources: 

AlphaGalileo.com

ScienceDaily.com

ScienceAlert.com

Spine-Health.com