Most people know about the placebo effect, but often we don’t understand it’s pervasiveness in our lives, nor do we consider how it plays a role in business success or failure.

Sometimes, I ask an audience “What’s the most powerful medicine ever documented?” After I respond, “No” to important discoveries from the last century of medicine, someone catches on and says, “The placebo”.

(Keywords: Change leaders, business culture, change beliefs, beliefs change, change leadership)

Definition

Here is a typical definition of the Placebo Effect: an inert matter or non-therapeutic action that produces a measurable, observable, or felt improvement in health not attributable to an actual treatment. A placebo improves every known human condition and ailment: back pain, arthritis, Parkinson’s, migraines, bleeding, asthma, colds, etc.

All valid scientific research requires a double blind test (neither the subject nor the experimenter knows which is the control and which is the independent variable), where the placebo effects lasts up to six weeks. Note the six week limit is only applicable within a double blind study; outside a double blind, the placebo effect can last years. For example, a person can take a prescription for Parkinson’s disease and feel benefits for a long time, even though the “medication” has no medicinal purposes. Outside of a double-blind experiment, there are many persistent clues that keep the effect going: the Doctor’s belief in the medication , the payment of subscription costs by insurance companies, the authority and expertise of pharmacists, the approval of the FDA, the patient’s own response to the placebo, the positive comments of family members and friends, etc.

I’m going to define the Placebo Effect more broadly: it is a result of belief that some named cause will have a named effect, and people experience it as true, even through there is no actual cause and effect. In addition, the placebo effect doesn’t have to be positive. This is an equal opportunity system. We can believe a cause creates a negative effect, such as “chocolate causes acne”. Aren't witchcraft or voodoo great examples of placebos that cause anxiety and fear in the victim?

What triggered my choosing this topic today was an article about the benefits of Acupuncture that came into my RSS feed. I’ll use Acupuncture as an example. I’m not picking on Acupuncture. All medical treatment, eastern and western, is highly suspect. Later, I’ll ask you to consider if this phenomenon doesn’t apply to businesses too.

Acupuncture is over two thousand years old. Here is the article from HealthDay news, “Americans Embrace Acupuncture's Healing Power”. The article points to a fMRI study that “proves” that Acupuncture (putting a needle in the toe) changes the brain. The article states that the National Institutes of Health list the ailments that are helped by Acupuncture. In addition, "About 40 states have now passed laws to monitor the practice of acupuncture," with these laws mandating anywhere from 2,000 to 5,000 hours of training before licenses are granted. Now, my BS detectors are already high, but here’s the quote that really caught my attention. “Proper regulation makes sense for a discipline that deserves to be taken as seriously as any other medical field, Lao said. He believes there's more and more evidence that ‘acupuncture helps the body respond to every system that's not working. So whatever you're looking at, you're going to see some change.’” So regardless of the system, Acupuncture will cause a change! Ding, Ding, Ding, placebo alert!

Here’s the problem for Acupuncture.

Studies that put the needles in the wrong place, have fake needles that don’t go into the skin, produce the same effect as “correct” acupuncture. In addition, a person who goes to different acupuncturists receives different diagnosis and different treatments with needles put in different places. See http://www.quackwatch.org/01QuackeryRelatedTopics/acu.html

Of course, Western medicine prescribes placebo’s every day. Pharmaceuticals promote drugs to doctors to prescribe for cures to diseases that have never been tested in double-blind studies. Here’s how that works. A doctor prescribes medicine as intended, and the patient and or the doctor notice some other beneficial effect. Then the doctor starts prescribing this medicine for a different reason. The patients respond to the placebo effect. Pharmaceuticals compare the patient records with the doctor’s prescription patterns and find the new use for the drug. (pharmaceuticals pay dearly for all this data.) . The pharmaceuticals contact the doctor to verify the new medical use of the drug. The pharmaceutical company may pay the doctor to promote, informally, this new use of the drug. Also, the doctor may informally share his or her “finding” with other doctors. In no time, the drug sales are improving for an unproven effect.

For example, American doctors wrote 1.5 million prescriptions for testosterone for older men in 2001, without a single double-blind study to back it up (even though hormone replacement for women was stopped because of the harmful effects).

It doesn’t matter whether the treatment is Acupuncture, pills, shots, or herbs. Over the last two years, brain fMRI studies show that the brain is actually releasing pain killers in response to a placebo. So the feeling of feeling better, feeling less pain, to any placebo, is real. It is really happening in the body and the brain. The patient is feeling better, literally.

East or West, the placebo effect runs wild among experts and patients. And equally true, the placebos actually work. The doctor means well; the patient means well. Both are unconscious of the placebo effect. The fact is, people are naturally wired up to believe in cause/effect and to change physiology and thoughts to match beliefs, even when the cause/effect isn’t real. Ah, but it feels real.

That’s the challenge. If something feels real, at an emotional and physiological level, we believe it’s real. That’s why people hold on to their “truths” so tightly. They feel real.

It also explains why reason or logic does not change beliefs. If the reasoning is counter to the feeling; the conflict creates resistance. The conflict is resolved by sticking with feelings. All rational arguments are washed away by a wave of rationalization.

Now, if you are like me, you are thinking, this is true of other people, but I don’t do this (I’m smarter, wiser, more aware, etc.). It appears that we all do it, and it may be the case that people with an internal locus of control (people who take personal responsibility for personal outcomes) are less influenced by the placebo effect.

Think about the placebo effect in society. If Acupuncture is practiced for thousands of years and is growing in acceptance in the US, what other beliefs are practiced and believed as true, but are really placebos?

Cultures, whether inside a company or a nation, are shared values and beliefs. How many of the “rules” of what works, what’s proper, what’s allowed, are placebos? Beliefs can be thought of as, “If X, than Y.” If everyone works more hours, profits will increase. If we let people have general internet access, productivity will fall. If we have too many female managers, we will loose our competitive zeal. If we want to increase revenues, give the salespeople bigger bonuses.

The question is, how many of a firm’s beliefs are true because they are indisputable rules of nature, and how many beliefs are true only because we believe them to be true? How many of our beliefs are sugar pills or curses?

What are the possibilities if we can learn to discover and challenge our placebos?

What if our placebo is working for us, should we live within the illusion?

What do you think?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Michael Cushman, The Engaging Guru, wants you to master enrolling others in your truth, get the goodies of life, and change the world.  www.engagingchange.com