Skip to content

Jeff Sutherland

Twice the Energy with Half the Stress

Placebo effect



As someone with a Ph.D. in Biometrics, and an M.S. in Statistics from Stanford University, I am appalled at what we have done to the mindset of physicians when we told them than many of their drugs were no better than the placebo effect.

They should have interpreted this to mean that their drugs are often worthless and that the placebo effect, which can stimulate powerful drug generation in the human body, is much better than drugs for many purposes.

They, of course, often twisted this in their minds to mean that their drugs were good and the placebo effect was worthless.

Anything that stimulates a placebo effect should be used extensively, as it often gets the job done without the negative side effects of drugs, and you completely avoid medication error, the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S.

At the Stanford Medical School when I was studying biostatistics there, we had every patient in the hospital on a clinical trial protocol. That made all results better because the placebo effect was helping to cure the patients in every case. This effect is a combination of improved immune system function due to positive attitude (now proved to be true in the medical literature), better care of the patient because care providers paid attention to the clinical protocol, and the powerful chemicals that the human body can internally generate that do the job without the negative side effects of synthetic drugs or medication errors caused by drug interaction, inappropriate dose, or simply giving the medication to the wrong patient (something that kills thousands of patients every year in our hospitals).

The placebo effect is always the best drug alternative available and physicians should always try to generate it to help them out when treating a patient. That is what we did at Stanford for every patient in the hospital.