A placebo is defined as a treatment that contains no inherent health effect in itself: given simply to reassure the recipient where no other substantive treatment is available. However this construction ignores an important fact being that the placebo effect proves the immense power of your mind.

Mainstream medicine often paints the placebo effect in a negative light as being a nuisance and or fantasy. Indeed they’re inclined to abandon treatment studies when placebos generate as positive a response as the chemical concoctions they’re testing.

If research has any validity at all it ought to be paid the attention it’s apparently due. Research proves repeatedly that placebo has an enormous ability to affect our health and healing. It appears that what you believe to be true does manifest as reality!

Studies on the placebo effect indicate recipients achieve highly significant positive results. Some research on the effectiveness of mental health medications suggest that placebos can prove to be as much as 90% as effective as medications for treating mental health issues such as depression and anxiety. I’m not sure if those placebo recipients also experienced the vastly negative side effects of the “real” mind altering medications?

Placebos can also get a remarkable result with apparently physical conditions too. It’s indicated that around one third of people given placebos, believing them to be medication, will experience an end to their symptoms!

The other insidious side to this effect is that if you’re told by powerful agencies in which you place your trust that bad things will happen they very likely will. The classic example is that decent doctors resist naming a timeframe in which a patient will die from their disastrous disease because they know the likelihood that their client’s super-consciousness may assent.

I’m not suggesting that all the many medicines and treatments be subcontracted out to a sugar factory. Rather I do suggest you put weight in the idea that the awareness’s you hold in your heart and your head are the true genesis of your physical and psychological experience.

That the body follows the mind may seem improbable to those who see themselves and others as merely physical forms yet I firmly assert such is so.  You are what you think and you feel. The placebo effect is proof of your colossal creative capacity.

Martin Hunter Jones is an honorary member of the Australian Counselling Association.