The congregants soon begin swaying and laying hands on one another, speaking in tongues and jumping up and down, dancing to the music in praise of their savior. They are overcome with the spirit, what they call “being anointed.” Then it’s time for the preacher to flip open one of the locked boxes, reach a hand in, and pull out a deadly snake—usually a rattlesnake, cottonmouth, or copperhead. He, too, is dancing and working up quite a sweat as he holds the live serpent around its middle so that the snake’s head is frighteningly close to the preacher’s own head and throat.
He might hold the snake high in the air before bringing it back down closer to his body, dancing all the while, as the snake winds its lower half around his arm and gyrates its upper half in the air in whatever manner it pleases. The preacher might then get a second or even a third snake from additional wooden cases, and the congregants, men and women alike, might join him in handling the serpents as they feel the anointing coming over them. In some services, the preacher might even ingest a poison, like strychnine, from a simple drinking glass, without suffering any ill effects.
Although the snake handlers do sometimes get bitten, considering the thousands of services where feverish believers have reached into those hinged wooden boxes without a trace of doubt or fear, it doesn’t happen often. And even when it does, they don’t always die—even though they don’t rush to the hospital, preferring instead to have the congregation gather around them in prayer. Why are these people not bitten more often? And why aren’t there more deaths when they do get bitten? How can they get into a state of mind where they are not afraid of such venomous creatures, whose bite is known to be deadly, and how can that state of mind protect them?
Then there are the displays of extreme strength in emergency situations, known as “hysterical strength.” In April 2013, for example, 16-year-old Hannah Smith and her 14-year-old sister, Haylee, of Lebanon, Oregon, lifted a 3,000-pound tractor to free their father, Jeff Smith, who was trapped underneath.19 And what about firewalkers—indigenous tribes practicing sacred rituals, and Westerners taking workshops—who stroll across burning coals? Or even the carnival showmen or Javanese trance dancers who feel compelled to chew and swallow glass (a disorder known as hyalophagia)?
How are such seemingly superhuman feats possible, and do they have something vital in common? Could it be that at the height of their uncompromising belief, these people are somehow changing their bodies such that they become immune to their environments? And can the same rock-solid belief that empowers snake handlers and firewalkers also go the other way, causing us to harm ourselves—and even die—without our having any awareness of what we’re doing?
Victory Over Voodoo
In 1938, a 60-year-old man in rural Tennessee spent four months getting sicker and sicker, before his wife brought him to a 15-bed hospital at the edge of town.20 By this time, Vance Vanders (not his real name) had lost more than 50 pounds and appeared to be near death. The doctor, Drayton Doherty, suspected that Vanders was suffering from tuberculosis or possibly cancer, but repeated tests and x-rays came up negative. Dr. Doherty’s physical examination showed nothing that could be causing Vanders’s distress. Vanders refused to eat, so he was given a feeding tube, but he stubbornly vomited whatever was put down the tube. He continued to get worse, repeating the conviction that he was going to die, and eventually he was barely able to talk. The end seemed near, although Dr. Doherty still had no idea what the man’s affliction was.
Vanders’s distraught wife asked to speak to Dr. Doherty privately and, swearing him to secrecy, told him that her husband’s problem was that he’d been “voodoo’d.” It seems that Vanders, who lived in a community where voodoo was a common practice, had had an argument with a local voodoo priest. The priest had summoned Vanders to the cemetery late one night, where he put a hex on the man by waving a bottle of malodorous liquid in front of Vanders’s face. The priest told Vanders that he would soon die and that no one could save him. That was it. Vanders was convinced that his days were numbered and thus believed in a new, dismal future reality. The defeated man returned home and refused to eat. Eventually, his wife brought him to the hospital.
After Dr. Doherty had heard the whole story, he came up with a rather unorthodox plan for treating his patient. In the morning, he summoned Vanders’s family to his bedside and told them that he was now certain that he knew how to cure the sick man. The family listened intently as Dr. Doherty spun the following fabricated tale. He said that on the previous night, he had gone to the cemetery, where he’d tricked the voodoo priest into meeting with him and divulging how he had voodoo’d Vanders. It hadn’t been easy, Dr. Doherty said. The priest had understandably not wanted to cooperate, although he finally relented once Dr. Doherty had pinned him against a tree and choked him.
Dr. Doherty said that the priest had told him that he’d rubbed some lizard eggs onto Vanders’s skin and that the eggs had found their way to Vanders’s stomach, where they’d hatched. Most of the lizards had died, but a large one had survived and was now eating Vanders’s body from the inside out. The doctor announced that all he had to do was remove the lizard from Vanders’s body and the man would be cured.
He then called for the nurse, who dutifully brought a large syringe filled with what Dr. Doherty claimed was a powerful medicine. In truth, the syringe was filled with a drug that induced vomiting. Dr. Doherty carefully inspected the syringe to make sure it was working right and then ceremoniously injected his frightened patient with the fluid. In a grand gesture, he left the room, not saying another word to the stunned family.
It wasn’t long before the patient began to vomit. The nurse provided a basin and Vanders heaved, wailed, and retched for a time. At a point that Dr. Doherty judged to be near the end of the vomiting, he confidently strode back into the room. Nearing the bedside, he reached into his black doctor’s bag and scooped up a green lizard, hiding it in his palm beyond anyone’s notice. Then just as Vanders vomited again, Dr. Doherty slipped the reptile into the basin.
“Look, Vance!” he immediately cried out with all the drama he could muster. “Look what has come out of you. You are now cured. The voodoo curse is lifted!”
The room was buzzing. Some family members fell to the floor, moaning. Vanders himself jumped back away from the basin, in a wide-eyed daze. Within a few minutes, he’d fallen into a deep sleep that lasted more than 12 hours.
When Vanders finally awoke, he was very hungry and eagerly consumed so much food that the doctor feared his stomach would burst. Within a week, the patient had regained all his weight and strength. He left the hospital a well man and lived at least another ten years.
Is it possible that a man could just curl up and die simply because he thought he’d been hexed? Does the contemporary witch doctor, adorned with a stethoscope and holding a prescription pad, speak with the same conviction for us as the voodoo priest did for Vanders—and is our belief the same? And if it’s indeed true that a person could, on one level, just decide to die, then could it also be true that a person with a terminal disease could make the decision to live? Can someone permanently change his or her internal state—dropping his or her identity as a cancer or arthritis victim or a heart patient or a person with Parkinson’s—and simply walk into a healthy body just as easily as shedding one set of clothes and donning another? In the upcoming chapters, we’ll explore what’s really possible and how that applies to you.
Chapter Two
A Brief History of the Placebo
As the saying goes, desperate times call for desperate measures. When Harvard-educated American surgeon Henry Beecher was serving in World War II, he ran out of morphine. Near the end of the war, morphine was in short supply in military field hospitals, so this situation wasn’t uncommon. At the time, Beecher was about to operate on a badly wounded soldier. He was afraid that without a painkiller, the soldier might go into fatal cardiovascular shock. What happened next astounded him.
Without skipping a beat, one of the nurses f
illed a syringe with saline and gave the soldier a shot, just as if she were injecting him with morphine. The soldier calmed down right away. He reacted as though he’d actually received the drug, even though all he’d received was a squirt of saltwater. Beecher went ahead with the operation, cutting into the soldier’s flesh, making what repairs were necessary, and sewing him back up, all without anesthesia. The soldier felt little pain and did not go into shock. How could it be, Beecher wondered, that saltwater could stand in for morphine?
After that stunning success, whenever the field hospital ran out of morphine, Beecher did the same thing again: injected saline, just as if he were injecting morphine. The experience convinced him of the power of placebos, and when he returned to the United States after the war, he began to study the phenomenon.
In 1955, Beecher made history when he authored a clinical review of 15 studies published by the Journal of the American Medical Association that not only discussed the huge significance of placebos, but also called for a new model of medical research that would randomly assign subjects to receive active medications or placebos—what we now refer to as randomized, controlled trials—so that this powerful placebo effect wouldn’t distort results.1
The idea that we can alter physical reality through thought, belief, and expectation alone (whether we are fully aware of what we’re doing or not) certainly didn’t start in that World War II field hospital. The Bible is filled with stories of miraculous healings, and even in modern times, people regularly flock to places such as Lourdes in southern France (where a 14-year-old peasant girl named Bernadette had a vision of the Virgin Mary in 1858), leaving behind their crutches, braces, and wheelchairs as proof that they’ve been healed. Similar miracles also have been reported in Fátima, Portugal (where three shepherd children saw an apparition of the Virgin Mary in 1917), and in connection with a traveling statue of Mary carved for the 30th anniversary of the apparition. The statue was based on the description given by the oldest of the three children, who by then had become a nun, and it was blessed by Pope Pius XII before it was sent traveling around the world.
Faith healing is certainly not confined to the Christian tradition. The late Indian guru Sathya Sai Baba, widely considered by his followers to be an avatar—a manifestation of a deity—was known to manifest holy ash called vibhuti from the palms of his hands. This fine gray ash has been said to have the power to heal many physical, mental, and spiritual ills when either eaten or applied to the skin as a paste. Tibetan lamas are also said to have healing powers, using their breath to heal by blowing on the sick.
Even French and English kings reigning between the 4th and 9th centuries used the laying on of hands to cure their subjects. King Charles II of England was known to be particularly adept at this, performing the practice about 100,000 times.
What is it that causes such so-called miraculous events, whether the instrument of healing is faith in a deity alone or belief in the extraordinary powers of a person, an object, or even a place deemed sacred or holy? What is the process by which faith and belief can bring about such profound effects? Might how we assign meaning to a ritual—whether that ritual is saying the rosary, rubbing a pinch of holy ash onto our skin, or taking a new miracle drug prescribed by a trusted physician—play a role in the placebo phenomenon? What if the internal state of mind of the people who received these cures was influenced or altered by the conditions in their external environment (a person, place, or thing at the proper time) to such a degree that their new state of mind could actually effect real physical changes?
From Magnetism to Hypnotism
In the 1770s, Viennese physician Franz Anton Mesmer made quite a name for himself by developing and demonstrating what was considered at that time a medical model of miraculous healing. Expanding on an idea of Sir Isaac Newton’s about the effect of planetary gravitation on the human body, Mesmer came to believe that the body contained an invisible fluid that could be manipulated to heal people using a force he called “animal magnetism.”
His technique involved asking his patients to look deeply into his eyes before moving magnets over their bodies to direct and balance this magnetic fluid. Later, he found that he could wave his hands (without the magnets) to produce the same effect. Soon after each session began, his patients would start trembling and twitching before going into convulsions that Mesmer considered therapeutic. Mesmer would continue the fluid balancing until they were calm again. He used this technique to heal a variety of maladies, from serious conditions like paralysis and convulsive disorders to more minor difficulties, such as menstrual problems and hemorrhoids.
In what became his most famous case, Mesmer partially cured teenage concert pianist Maria-Theresia von Paradis of “hysterical blindness,” a psychosomatic condition she’d had since about the age of three. She stayed in Mesmer’s home for weeks as he worked with her and finally helped her to be able to perceive motion and even distinguish color. But her parents were less than overjoyed by her progress, because they stood to lose a royal pension if their daughter was cured. In addition, as her sight returned, her piano playing deteriorated because she now was able to watch her fingers on the keyboard. Rumors, never substantiated, began circulating that Mesmer’s relationship to the pianist was improper. Her parents forcibly removed her from Mesmer’s house, her blindness returned, and Mesmer’s reputation diminished considerably.
Armand-Marie-Jacques de Chastenet, a French aristocrat known as the Marquis de Puységur, observed Mesmer and took his ideas to the next level. Puységur would induce a deep state that he called “magnetic somnambulism” (similar to sleepwalking), in which his subjects had access to deep thoughts and even intuitions about their health and that of others. In this state, they were extremely suggestible and would follow instructions, although they had no memory of what happened once they came out of it. Whereas Mesmer thought that the power was in the practitioner over the subject, Puységur believed that the power was in the thought of the subject (directed by the practitioner) over his or her own body; this was perhaps one of the first therapeutic attempts to explore the mind-body relationship.
In the 1800s, Scottish surgeon James Braid took the idea of mesmerism still further, developing a concept he called “neurypnotism” (what we now know as hypnotism). Braid became intrigued by the idea when one day he arrived late for an appointment only to find his waiting patient calmly staring in intense fascination at the flickering flame of an oil lamp. Braid found the patient to be in an extremely suggestible state as long as his attention remained so locked, thereby “fatiguing” certain parts of his brain.
After many experiments, Braid learned to get his subjects to concentrate on a single idea while staring at an object, which put them into a similar trance that he felt he could use to cure their disorders, including chronic rheumatoid arthritis, sensory impairment, and the various complications of spinal injuries and stroke. Braid’s book Neurypnology details many of his successes, including the story of how he cured both a 33-year-old woman whose legs were paralyzed and a 54-year-old woman with a skin disorder and severe headaches.
Then esteemed French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot weighed in on Braid’s work, claiming that the ability to go into such a trance was possible only in those suffering from the condition of hysteria, which he considered an inherited neurological disorder that was irreversible. He used hypnosis not to cure patients, but to study their symptoms. Finally, a rival of Charcot’s, a doctor named Hippolyte Bernheim at the University of Nancy, insisted that the suggestibility so central to hypnotism was not confined to hysterics but was a natural condition for all humans. He implanted ideas in subjects, telling them that when they awoke from their trance, they would feel better and their symptoms would disappear; thus he used the power of suggestion as a therapeutic tool. Bernheim’s work continued into the early 1900s.
Although each of these early explorers of suggestibility had a slightly different focus and technique, they were all able to help hundreds and hundreds o
f people heal a wide variety of physical and mental problems by changing their minds about their maladies and about how those illnesses were expressed in their bodies.
During the first two world wars, military doctors, most notably Army psychiatrist Benjamin Simon, used the concept of hypnotic suggestibility (which I’ll discuss further later) to help returning soldiers who suffered from the trauma that was first labeled “shell shock” but is now known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). These veterans had suffered through such horrible war experiences that many of them numbed themselves to their emotions as a form of self-preservation, developed amnesia surrounding the horrific events, or, worse, kept reliving their experiences in flashbacks—all of which can cause stress-induced physical illness. Simon and his colleagues found hypnosis extremely useful for helping the veterans face their traumas and cope with them so that they wouldn’t have to resurface as anxiety and physical ailments (including nausea, high blood pressure and other cardiovascular disorders, and even suppressed immunity). Like those practitioners in the century before them, Army doctors employing hypnosis helped their patients alter their patterns of thinking in order to get well and reclaim their mental and physical health.
These hypnosis techniques were so successful that civilian doctors also became interested in using suggestibility, although many did so not by putting their patients into a trance but by occasionally giving them sugar pills and other placebos and telling them that these “drugs” would make them better. The patients often did get better, responding to suggestibility in the same way that Beecher’s wounded soldiers responded to the belief that they were receiving shots of morphine. This was, in fact, Beecher’s era, and after he wrote his groundbreaking 1955 review calling for the use of randomized, controlled trials with placebos for testing drugs, the placebo became a serious part of medical research.
You Are the Placebo Page 6