Healing, and Human Touch

Early this summer, I spent several days in a hospital bed, tethered to an IV, with what proved in retrospect to be anaplasmosis (a nasty bit of tick-borne business), complicated by viral meningitis. The latter was likely due to the immunosuppression of the primary infection. It was all rather unpleasant. Among other things, I had a constant, moderate headache punctuated by crushing head pain- easily, the worst headaches I've ever experienced. I was given narcotics when the pain was at its worst, and they didn't do much for me, despite their two distinct advantages. The first is that these drugs are genuinely effective at treating pain; the second is that I had every reason to expect them to work. The latter matters, because placebo effects are real. They are not a therapeutic effect attributable to the specific actions of a drug or modality. They are a therapeutic effect that is independent of that specific action, and are thus deemed "nonspecific." They relate to our expectations. When we expect a treatment to work, our body reacts accordingly, and that, in turn, can be therapeutic. This should be no great surprise. Most of us have heard of the "endorphins" accountable for a runner's high. These, essentially, are the body's native narcotics, and it is receptors to such compounds that explain why non-native narcotics work at all. They are chemically enough like our own, endogenous analgesics to bind to the same receptors. In any event, narcotics really do work; and, as a...
Source: Healthy Living - The Huffington Post - Category: Consumer Health News Source Type: news