What cures you?

Anesthesia (and muscle relaxants) made modern surgery possible, and antibiotics added the third mode of attack against which bacteria seemed outgunned and ultimately helpless. A pill or a potion has become the reflexive response to everything from a sniffle to a major illness.

Although medicine is vastly more scientific these days, the healing power of 'pills' still owes a lot to far older treatments of illness. Doctors and patients conspire together to attribute cures to procedures that have no intrinsic therapeutic values (at least scientifically). A good example is the cure of a viral infection by the prescription and swallowing of an antibiotic that can only work against bacteria - not viruses!

The U.S. Office of Technology Assessment has published numbers which suggest that as little as 20 percent of modern remedies are provably effective by empirical and unbiased trials. But they work!

Since the 1980's, Dr. Walter A. Brown has been trying to find out why. Early results suggest that a powerful factor in treatment of illness is what he calls "the placebo effect". The very act of seeking and receiving treatment for a medical condition makes a person feel better, less disabled and less distressed and this in turn often leads to a speeded recovery regardless of the scientific merits of the procedure involved.

In a recent study doctors at the University of Southampton in England took 200 patients who complained of a physical condition that had no identifiable disease. Some were confidently told that all the test showed that they had no serious disease and that they would get well soon - they did. Two weeks later 64 percent had fully recovered. The second group was told that the cause of their problem was unknown and two weeks later only 39 percent felt better. Such findings would indicate that the patient's state of mind and belief plays an important part in his or her recovery.

In our story Cesky Brezen claims that only bitter medicine works. In this he is not completely wrong. 'Bitter' medicine, even that which contains no drug or cure, often produces miraculous results that the drug alone never provides. You have to believe it is curing you for a medicine to work. Disease is understood to be an abnormal state of the body, but illness is more complex than that. Illness involves suffering and the mental state that goes with it. Doctors are excellent at treating disease with scientifically proven drugs and cures, but relieving illness is more complex and requires that the patient have faith in the power of the physician or the procedure for it to be effective.

We still have a lot to learn.