The Power of Belief

Placebo is a very strange concept. If we tell someone a pill will solve their pain, but don’t put any special medicine in the pill, they still describe relief from pain. A common interpretation of this is that the pain must not have been real in the first place. However, researchers have shown that administration of naloxone, a compound that blocks opioid receptors within the brain, blocks the effect of the fake pain pill (Levine, Gordon, & Fields, 1978). This meant that natural pain killers were being released within the brain, creating a biological mechanism of pain reduction. It was not that participants imagined the pain, it was their imagination which released real pain killers in their brain!

In psychedelic research, placebo has been a major topic of controversy. It’s very easy to tell when you received the psychedelic rather than the placebo (though, surprisingly, there are still examples of people imagining they received it when they hadn’t). This complicates the positive results because we don’t know how much improvement was because of placebo or because of the drug. Many researchers have suggested that psychedelics may be “super-placebos” which act directly to exaggerate the power of people’s beliefs.

Researchers have come up with creative ways to work around the placebo challenge of psychedelics. One of which was the administration of ketamine while patients were unconscious, under surgical anesthesia. This study found that there was no difference between placebo groups and ketamine, but that both groups showed 50-60% reduction in depression scores. In an interview by The Microdose, a newsletter by Michael Pollan and the U.C. Berkeley Center for the Science of Psychedelics, they asked the lead on the study, Boris Heifets, about the results. I found his perspective incredibly beautiful:

“Placebo is a real thing with a biological mechanism. And if we accept that there's a biological mechanism, then why shouldn't we expect that you can act through that mechanism to achieve therapeutic change? Maybe psychedelics act on that very mechanism, that mechanism of expectancy and hope. If there were a drug that could improve your likelihood of feeling hope again, that’s a real drug! What if we thought about psychedelics that way.”

The current medical system has used science to shift our perspective away from personal belief. This shift has bled into how we treat mental health, which is a field in which belief has a far greater impact. Perhaps psychedelics are giving us an opportunity to understand something crucial to being human. Perhaps they can help us bring the power of belief back into mental health. Do your best to remain open to the power of belief in your life. You can use it to create your own set of powerful chemicals within your brain.

With Love,

Michael