Heroes Not Zombies

David Corfield posted about an interesting study of the placebo effect. It describes a piece of research into the power of language to effect physical change. Hotel maids burn up a lot of calories through the very nature of their work which is physical from start to finish. But interestingly most of them reckon they do no exercise and their body size and shape isn’t much different from the average woman. The researchers took a group of hotel maids and divided them into two sub-groups, one of which received information in an interview about how many calories they were using up in their different chores. The other sub-group received no information. They found that all the maids’ body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, blood pressure, weight and body mass index measurements were consistent with their perceived level of exercise. One month later they found that in the educated group there was a decrease in their systolic blood pressure, weight, and waist-to-hip ratio — and a 10 percent drop in blood pressure. Observations by the team hadn’t shown any changes in the maids’ routines or physical exercise. So it was changing the state of mind which changed the state of the body.

In the report of this study, the writers find a critic who says that such a placebo effect cannot effect a physical change as placebo can only effect subjective changes. That’s such nonsense! And the article concludes with a great example of asthmatics being given a drug which would make their asthma worse, but being told it would make it better. They not only claimed their asthma was better but the objective lung function readings improved.

Words were originally magic

— Sigmund Freud