Hiding in plain sight.
Why aren’t we all continuously amazed by the Placebo Effect? You know, when you give someone a tic-tac, call it chemotherapy and within 24 hours their tumor is 1/2 the size it was yesterday? (It’s not an exaggeration; it’s actually happened!) Why isn’t it treated like a miracle rather than an annoyance? Big Pharma swats at the Placebo Effect like a fly at a picnic.
To me, it’s nothing short of incredible, the power of our minds to heal.
Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard University’s Program in Placebo Studies said this about it:
“A sugar pill doesn’t do anything. What does something is the context of healing. It’s the rituals of healing. It’s being in the healing relationship… But the placebo pill is a wonderful tool, or a saline injection is a wonderful tool, to isolate what is usually in the background, take it away from the medications and procedures that medicine does, and actually study just the act of caring. That’s, I think, what we’re measuring when we study placebo effects.”
Imagine, just because we believe we can, we clear our arteries of the plaque that results in a terminal heart condition. Because someone cares, we rid our organs of the cancer cells. We get three tiny incisions cut into our knee, we’re told we received a meniscus surgery (while the surgeon snickers behind our back, because we didn’t receive anything but a 2cm incision). But we return to a fully functioning knee joint which never again troubles us!
All true stories, 100% real, thanks to the power of our own minds.
Not all answers can be found in a lab.
It’s near impossible to ask quantitative research to measure the strength or the healing of our psychological wellbeing. It’s hard to measure something like the progress of a coaching relationship using controlled clinical trials. But as the millions of people who spontaneously heal themselves of terminal conditions, humans show science that we can’t always be explained by the scientific method.
People heal. All the time. From conditions of the psyche or conditions of the body, it makes no difference.
When I read the above quote from the Harvard placebo researcher, I was so excited that an ivy league scientist nailed it, so purely. Transformational Coaching is a “ritual of healing.” It’s “being in a healing relationship.” Our minds are pure potential, pure power. When somebody we trust is partnering with us, in service to becoming our most authentic self, we respond. Our heart, mind, and spirit expands.
Not everything can be explained.
And in case anyone was wondering if the confidence bar is high enough, I’ll share Dr. Kaptchuk’s response to an interview question. He was asked why he is also trained as a Chinese medicine acupuncturist when most randomized, controlled clinical trials failed to demonstrate its effectiveness beyond the placebo effect.
In other words, in these studies, people received acupuncture and people received “fake” acupuncture with dummy needles (the placebo group) and the placebo group actually reported better results. So, to answer the question, Kaptchuk said,
“Because I am a damn good healer. That is the difficult truth. If you needed help and you came to me, you would get better. Thousands of people have. Because, in the end, it isn’t really about the needles. It’s about the man.”
Now, that’s confidence.
Let that be a guide for you to own your craft, my friends. Let this be a guide for you to own your life.
Much Love.
Kristy
P.S. ~ For a deeper dive into the powers of our own healing, you can read my book, The Fascinated Observer: A Guide to the STAR Philosophy.
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