Sick care, fear programming and the power of the placebo
“They all use the tools that they have. But how many of them use the tools that WE have? The innate healing ability that lives within our own bodies and can be harnessed by our belief system. ”
- Ericka Thomas
Transcript
How a steady diet of fear keeps us sick
What do you believe about your health? Who makes and keeps you healthy? Who is the expert in your physical, mental and emotional health? Today on the Work IN we’re going to talk about how our health beliefs and fear programming can make us and keep us sick, how big pharma and big food in collusion with the media and big government make that happen, and how you can take back your power.
It’s funny sometimes to point and laugh or roll your eyes at people who get caught up in all the tin foil hat conspiracy theories out there. I’m not talking about “the truth is out there” theories and aliens…because those are totally true. I’m talking about the subtle conspiracies that hit closer to home. The ones that no one wants to believe. Not because they couldn’t be true but because if they are true it means that the people we trust to take care of us, represent us and do what’s best for us, help us when we are sick do not actually have our best interest at heart. I am talking about the subconscious social-lies that require us to deny what we see with our eyes, feel in our own bodies and be fully indoctrinated by fear in order to swallow. And that makes us foolish useful idiots.
I’m going to ask a lot of questions in this episode. Consider it an opportunity for you to follow some of these ideas down the rabbit hole for yourself. I will tell you that I have suspected a lot of what we’ll talk about today for a long time, I just didn’t really know. And that’s because I, like many of you, was raised to trust “the experts”, to not question people in authority. Like parents, preachers, teachers, doctors, government officials, journalists. I, like many of you, have been successfully programmed to believe what I’m told, to not ask questions, to mistrust my own “feeling” and override my own belief in favor of the latest well crafted prose even when what I see with my own eyes doesn’t match the marketing. Others must know better than me. But this good girl is breaking blind.
Breaking blind
In all scientific studies, but especially drug and medical studies the gold standard is the random double blind placebo study. This is where groups of participants and doctors are randomly assigned into either the active drug group, the placebo group (sugar pill) or sometimes a control group with nothing. Neither the participants nor the doctors know who gets what. Supposedly. Breaking blind is a term that means somehow that either the study participants or the doctors or both can figure out the truth. In other words, guess that they have the placebo or the drug.
Scientists need that blindness to be sure that the treatment they are testing is actually having an effect and not the placebo effect.
It turns out that the placebo effect plays a powerful role and has a powerful effect on the health outcome. In many cases the placebo effect can and does outperform many of our drugs and sometimes even surgery. Especially in the treatment of depression and anxiety.
I’m sure you haven’t heard of this. It’s certainly not in the mainstream zeitgeist because it’s bad news for drug companies who are trying to capitalize on the 1 in 3 people diagnosed with depression and anxiety since covid. Basically they have created an entire class of drugs, antidepressants, that carry all the risks including suicidal and violent aggressive behavior in adolescents and young adults; stroke, death from all causes, falls and fractures, and epileptic seizures in the elderly; and sexual dysfunction, withdrawal symptoms, diabetes, deep vein thrombosis, and gastrointestinal and intracranial bleeding in everyone else. Notes But cannot be teased out from the positive effect that is seen in placebo effect.
Basically what we see in these studies is the placebo works as well if not better than the drug and can double the effectiveness of the drug. I’m going to encourage all of you to check the show notes on this, don't just take my word for it.
I’ve never understood how a drug that’s supposed to alleviate something like depression and anxiety could actually also make it worse as a side effect. Why is that OK with the FDA?
Apparently because of statistics. And many statistical criteria are arbitrary. Which in turn makes the significance of drug-placebo effects also arbitrary.
But let’s be honest. When it comes to better living through pharmaceuticals it is all about the money. There’s no money in sugar pills, or an exercise plan or a prescription for a mindfulness plan even when they have been shown to work as well or better than many of these drugs with no or few side effects.
Why? How is that possible?
The power of placebo
It’s possible because what we believe about what we’re doing matters. In fact, when study participants know or believe they have gotten the active drug, it is 2x as effective. Placebo effect is not a trick though. Because even when people know they’re being given a placebo they still have measurable improvements. And these results show up not only in mental health related studies. Depression, pain, fatigue, allergies, irritable bowel syndrome, Parkinson's disease and even osteoarthritis of the knee are just a few of the conditions that respond positively to placebos. There could be more, we just don’t necessarily have the studies to show it. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen.
Have you ever had that conversation with your doctor? I haven’t. But before you throw out all of your prescriptions maybe/definitely you should.
Now we aren’t talking about acute medical care, we're talking about so-called health care. The idea that visiting your doctor every year will magically somehow keep you healthy.
I’ll never forget when my mom told me her good friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was devastating because she had “done everything right” all the things that her doctors told her and still she got the one thing she was afraid of. Look I really hate to say this because medicine can do miraculous things and I want to believe that our medical system can fix anything but doctors are disappointing. I wonder if they feel disappointed at the lack of tools they have to help people. The lack of time to educate. The lack of depth of care. The siloed approach to the human body.
I used to work for a veterinary clinic as a receptionist way back in another lifetime. The vet used to say “a chance to cut is a chance to cure”. I didn't think much about it at the time but that's kind of a macabre attitude when you’re talking about animals let alone people. Surgery was his tool. When all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail. That osteoarthritis of the knee placebo study I just mentioned was a placebo surgery. I think about that everytime I get sucked into our so-called health care system because every doctor is very limited in their scope. Think about it. Dentist for teeth, eye doctor, ob/gyn (bikini medicine), urologist, gastroenterologist, cardiologist, oncologist, pain dr’s, orthopedic, dermatologist and on and on. Then there’s the lowly general practitioners whose only job it seems is to send people to all the others. The last time I went to my eye doctor she referred me out to another ophthalmologist who then referred me to another optometrist. I had to see 3 people before they decided whatever it was they were looking at was A. Not something to worry about and B. Not something they would or could do anything about anyway. I bet billing loves them.
They all use the tools that they have. But how many of them use the tools that WE have? The innate healing ability that lives within our own bodies and can be harnessed by our belief system.
Sick care
Conspiracy should have no place in health care because of that little thing called science. But we don’t have a health care system, do we? We have a sick care system. A system designed to separate us from our own internal knowledge of ourselves and corrupted by the almighty dollar. Doctors, clinics, hospitals, when you really look at them, they are in business. Big business, pure and simple. As a business it needs to grow its followers, its customers, by teaching us why we need them. By staying top of mind and cultivating true fans.
How do they do that? Well they use the tried and true marketing tool called “fear”. It's a subtle and manipulative form of programming and once you see it you can’t unsee it. I’m talking about drug ads being used to program fear and uncertainty.
The drug ads on TV that don’t tell you the name of the drug, they just talk about symptoms and then tell you to talk to your doctor. Or they show a flash mob of dancers singing about the latest drug du jour. They say things like “if you have itchy eyes, talk to your doctor about this brand name drug.” And don’t even get me started on the alphabet soup of illness acronyms.
I was looking for a doctor the other day, a primary care physician, and on a hospital search site and there were 6 different drug popups on every page, under each physician profile. Not on google, this is within an insurance and hospital physician directory. Guess we know who pays the bills.
Aside from the ethical questions that drug marketing direct to consumers next to physician bios raises in my mind, why does that matter?
Fear Programming
Be honest, when you see and hear those ads, is there not some small voice in your head wondering if that could be you? Do I fit that description? Is there something wrong with me?
And that’s the key. They have succeeded in making you question what you feel. They have succeeded in harnessing the suggestibility of fear. They’ve basically implanted the idea that you may not be well, and you might need a doctor to help you get healthy. No not that you might need a doctor but that you definitely need one because this pretty pill is by prescription only and if you can’t afford it contact astrazeneca because there may be ways to get to you. (insert hard eye roll here)
The reason we might want to be aware of this manipulative subconscious health programming that is now running almost constantly in the background of all media is because of the power of belief, the power of the placebo effect. Just as easily as we can convince ourselves that a sugar pill is working, we can also convince our nervous system that we are sick, weak and vulnerable.
Our collective covid experience proved this if it did nothing else. This was the ultimate in fear programming. They made us afraid of not just the virus but each other in ways that are still reverberating in society today. We can be and are still being programmed into chronic illness by big food, big pharma and by default big government in the name of “health care.”
But covid also did something else for us. By deify-ing science,I believe the powers that be went a step too far. It began breaking the blind and unraveling some of those same beliefs about what healthy is and how we get and stay there.
Big food insisted for years based on cherry picked science that fat our diet was the root of all evil and heart disease and structured the standard American diet on 9 servings of grains and cereals per day. At the same time big government subsidized the breadbasket of America to provide cheap high fructose corn syrup to replace the long lost flavor in all our newly fat free franken foods. Food science taught everyone to count those calories and now there’s a full on campaign against animal protein that is herding us into frailty and dependence as we age.
Deprogramming
Who do you trust? Who do you trust to keep you healthy? The person you see once a year for 10 minutes or the person who lives in your own skin with you 24/7 who knows your habits and thoughts like the back of your hand?
What if we started to believe in that person? What if we started looking at our plate as the prescription that we needed all along. The daily dose of healing through fiber, protein, and healthy whole foods the way God intended, not the god of science.
Shifting your mindset about how you see your own health is a great start. Changing your internal monologue to things like”I’m a person who eats healthy clean food.” or “I'm a person who walks everyday.” seems stupid and small but it can begin to reprogram your brain and recondition your body to expect healthy things. When you expect healthy things you start to do healthy things and your body actually gets healthier. That’s the placebo effect.
If you want to explore this further I highly recommend the book “You are the Placebo” by Dr Joe Dispenza. Check it out. It’s a great read.
Thanks for listening to my rant today! If you're looking for ways to handle the effects of stress, physically, mentally and emotionally head over to savagegracecoaching.com/theworkin you’ll find all the show notes for this and other episodes plus lots of free resources. And if you’re in a place where you are ready for more and you live in the Dayton Ohio area I’m taking private clients for trauma informed yoga and trauma release exercise in person and online. So you can book a discovery call and we can have a real life conversation. And of course I’d be ever so grateful if you would take a moment to like and subscribe to this podcast wherever you’re listening.
Thanks again everyone and as always stop working out and start working IN.
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Hey there!
I’m your host Ericka Thomas. I'm a health coach and trauma informed yoga professional bringing real world resilience and healing to main street USA.
I offer trauma release + yoga + wellness education for groups and individuals…regular people like you.
Book a call to learn how I can help.