Just One Question | Shamini Jain: How Can You Heal From the Placebo Effect?

Chris: Hello and welcome to Just One Question from Insights at the Edge. I’m Chris Rock.

Mallory: And I’m Mallory Corbin. We’re producers at the Sounds True Podcast Network. We work with Tami on Insights at the Edge to bring you transformational ideas from wisdom teachers around the world.

Chris: And every week on this show, we pull out some of the most inspiring, most transformational ideas from those hundreds of conversations, and we bring them to you in the form of one question and one answer.

Mallory: Thus the name, Just One Question.

Chris: We hope you enjoy.

Chris: So today, Mallory, we’re going back into the world of energy healing.

Mallory: Oh boy.

Chris: For some listener context, Mallory and I just recently finished producing a podcast series called Phenomena, about the science and stories of energy healing.

Mallory: We worked on it for about a year and a half. And I guess, Chris, you’re not quite done with it?

Chris: I am not done with energy healing. There’s one aspect of it that I found really fascinating in that work, and I came across this conversation Tami had with Shamini Jain in 2023 [year — verify] that covered this exact thing. And that is the placebo effect.

Mallory: Okay. Yeah, we touched on that a bit in the podcast.

Chris: Yeah. A lot of people say that energy healing is just placebo, right? It’s all in their head.

Mallory: Okay, so like they’re imagining it.

Chris: Yeah, they’re imagining it and it’s not real. But what we learned in the podcast — and what Shamini is going to talk about even more here — is that placebo doesn’t mean it’s not real. In fact, I remember more than one person we talked to preferred to call it the meaning effect, because placebo had this really terrible connotation.

Anyway, Shamini Jain is an Ivy League-trained clinical psychologist, an award-winning research scientist in psychoneuroimmunology and integrative medicine, and she’s also a teacher in the upcoming Sounds True Subtle Energy Healing Immersion, which starts literally this week. You can learn more about that at soundstrue.com.

But we’re gonna hear what she has to say about placebo.

Mallory: Okay. We’re going back to energy healing, for what I cannot promise will be the last time, with Shamini Jain answering the question: “How can you heal from the placebo effect?”

Chris: Stay with us.

Tami Simon: Now, there’s one other big topic I want to talk to you about. This is the second time you and I have had a conversation like this, and the first time it came up, I was unfamiliar with your work and it really took me a while to understand what you were saying. I’d never thought about it this way, and it has to do with the placebo and the placebo effect.

The first time we talked about it, you were defending the power of the placebo effect — that even if it’s the placebo effect, this is good, healing’s happening. But I had this mindset at the time like, no, placebos just mean we’re being fooled. That’s terrible. That’s stupid. I don’t want to be the kind of person who falls for the placebo effect. So here we go. Help our listeners understand how you see and understand the placebo effect.

Shamini Jain: So here’s the truth about placebo. Placebo equals what I call HEAL — holistic elements that activate life force. Now, some scientists don’t like the term life force. You can say elements that activate our healing response.

Why do I say that? I outline all this, as you know, Tami, in the book. Here’s some of what we know about placebo. You don’t have to be duped to get well with a placebo. There are studies being done by my colleagues at Harvard University right now that are called open-label placebo studies. They’re actually giving patients with chronic pain placebos, and they’re telling them, this is a placebo. I’m giving you a placebo pill, and placebo has been shown to have beneficial healing effects. Guess what? They get better. So they’re being told they’re getting a placebo and they get better. The idea that we have to be tricked at all is just false. We actually don’t.

So what is placebo? When we break down placebo, there are many different elements, both conscious and what we might call unconscious. These are things like expectation. Mentally, does my mindset think that I’m going to have a positive healing response? This is my conscious mind — a huge driver of effects.

But there’s also something called conditioning, which sort of straddles the conscious and the subconscious. I’m going to lie on a massage table. What has my body mind experienced before when I’ve received massage? Did it relax? If so, my body mind is probably going to relax the minute I get on the table, because I’m conditioned for that response. So this is all very behavioral, and it involves the body and the mind.

But there’s more than that. There’s relationship. We know that powerful things happen when we feel trust and connection with our healthcare providers, whether that’s a healer or a doctor. There are many studies that have looked at the differences of improved immunity — even responses to the common cold — based on how connected we felt our practitioners are with us, and how connected we feel. So that’s a powerful driver of so-called placebo effects.

And then meaning and ritual, which of course has been part of indigenous medicine for ages. What does this mean to me? There’s so much research on that. But what’s interesting is these effects — expectation, conditioning, ritual, relationship — they occur in every single healing encounter. That’s why we see placebo effects in surgery. We see placebo effects with drugs. We see placebo effects in acupuncture.

Tami Simon: Right. So I have to interrupt you on this one, because I wrote this down: placebo effects are significant in surgery. You write about this in your book Healing Ourselves, and I was like, I don’t understand this. I don’t understand it.

Shamini Jain: So this is based on not just one study, but what we call systematic reviews, which is mostly what I cover in the book. I don’t cover just one-off studies. Mostly they’re all what we call systematic reviews, compiling the data across many, many different randomized controlled trials.

And so these, in the case of placebo surgery, have been done where we’ve looked at what happens if people are told they get surgery — they may even get anesthesia, and they may get an incision — but they don’t actually get the surgery. And we see that they get better. We see that their functional outcomes in many cases are the same, and across different types of surgery.

So in these cases, they were part of a study, and they were told, you are going to be part of a study and you may be randomized to one group or another group. One of the groups is going to get the actual surgery — let’s just call it bariatric surgery, for example. You know those surgeries that are done to shrink the stomach, essentially.

Tami Simon: Okay.

Shamini Jain: So we’ll take that example. That’s just one of the examples. So you may get this actual bariatric surgery. You may be randomized to the group that gets the actual surgery, or you may be randomized to a group that gets the placebo surgery. They’re told this at the outset and they don’t know what group they’re in. So essentially they’re all given the same treatment, except that one is given the surgery and one isn’t.

They come into the hospital, they sign the forms, they sign their informed consent saying that they’re going to be in one group or the other. They don’t know which, and they’ll be told after the study is done. They get anesthesia. They’re told they’re going into surgery — all of them, regardless of which group they’re in, the real surgery or the placebo surgery. They may wake up and see an incision, and then they’re followed over time. How are you doing? How are your outcomes? How’s your quality of life? All these kinds of things, depending on what kind of surgery it is. And then they respond, and then we look at the data to see, is there a difference between the people who actually got surgery and the people who didn’t get surgery but thought they got surgery. That’s how we can tease out placebo effects.

Now, of course, in my energy healing study, I did it quite differently. I was more nuanced. I even asked questions about how connected they felt with their practitioner and how much they felt like treatments were helping them. There are many different ways you can look at these placebo effects. But yes, even in surgery — and this is so fascinating, Tami, because most surgery studies have not been asked to go through what we call placebo-control designs. Those are really designed more for things like drug studies. Most surgery studies don’t have placebo arms. But when we look at those that do, we start scratching our heads and wondering, is surgery really the only way to address this particular clinical issue? Or could there be other ways to address the issue?

So it’s really amazing, because again, it turns the whole thing on its head. And science — I’m sorry, but we’ve had this all wrong, because we’ve been trying to control for the placebo effect like it’s a bad thing. The placebo effect is our natural healing response.

And so when we look at these studies in surgery, or even the studies with depression and antidepressants, where we’re finding that for mild to moderate symptoms of depression the drugs account for about 25% of the response, and other effects, including placebo and natural history, account for 75% — what does that mean? Well, instead of saying antidepressants don’t work, we could just say, wow, we work. We actually work when we believe that our depression can get better, when we actually set our mind-body system to receive healing and move past what we call a negative steady state.

I’ve been in a steady state of depression — I’m nerding out a little and calling this a steady state. This is sort of just a place that I’ve been in. And we are all coming out of pandemic, coming in and out of pandemic, I should say. So we’ve been in these really funky steady states. How do we pop ourselves out of it? Well, the placebo research is telling us that we have tremendous power to pop ourselves out of it ourselves.

So how do we do that? Again, we set our expectations. We create our healing rituals. We understand the meaning and context behind — what does my illness mean to me? What does it mean for me to get well? And then we unite our mental and our vital forces to [ignite?] our healing responses. And so this is why this is just fundamental. Instead of trying to get rid of these things in our scientific studies, we should actually be looking at them as what we call both-and effects, not either-or effects.

It’s never been about drugs or acupuncture versus the placebo. It’s the wrong question. The question is really, what do these additional healing practices do to [ignite?] my innate healing response? I am my best healer. Everything else that I seek out outside of myself is just to augment that healing response that exists in me. It’s a fundamental. It’s part of my soul nature.

So once we start recognizing that our soul nature is to be in harmony, and that’s our birthright — we’re embodied beings that have this birthright to be in our true soul nature, to experience bliss, to experience harmony and contentment — then the world looks very different. Now we’re in power. We’re not out of power.

Chris: This has been Just One Question. You can find the full interview that this conversation was taken from wherever you find podcasts or at soundstrue.com. Thank you for joining us, and we’ll see you next week.