Thanks to Marilyn W.
Ed Note: Placebo is a Latin word which translates as “I shall please.” If you’re interested, click here to read a blog post I wrote about one of my patients responding to the “drug” obecalp.
By Sam Scott in the Stanford Magazine
Alia Crum’s long history of experiments exploring the mind’s influence over the body began with a record-scratch moment midway through her undergraduate career at Harvard, in the early 2000s. At the time, Crum was a member of Harvard’s ice hockey team, a juggernaut that would go to three consecutive NCAA championship games during her four years in Cambridge. Crum was a role player, but her dedication was total. If the team trained three hours, she would top it off with an hour alone on the StairMaster. All the sweat equity, however, didn’t much impress psychology professor Ellen Langer, Crum’s academic adviser. “You know that exercise is just a placebo, right?” Crum recalls Langer saying.
The comment left Crum momentarily stunned. “Like, um, what did you just say?” But almost as quickly, it crystallized thoughts Crum had long had. Her studies—and life experiences—had made her keenly aware of the power of the mind to sway the body. Later that year, she would write a life mission statement, one that describes her work at Stanford today: “To help improve people’s health and happiness through increased understanding of the mind-body connection.” So, was she getting fitter and stronger because of all those hours in the gym? Or was it because she believed she would get fitter and stronger? What had sounded like a preposterous claim became an invitation for Crum to dig deeper.
Working under Langer, Crum recruited 88 female housekeepers from seven hotels to test the influence of their beliefs on their physical health. Few of the women said they got regular exercise—a third said they got none. Then the researchers gave half the women presentations revealing a hidden truth. Just by doing their jobs—where they might, for example, burn 60 calories in 15 minutes cleaning bathrooms—they were easily satisfying the surgeon general’s recommendation for a healthy lifestyle.
This change in perception seemed to change reality. Four weeks later, the women who heard the presentation perceived themselves as getting more exercise, despite reporting no change in their job duties or outside activities. Their bodies seemed likewise convinced. They showed a decrease in weight, waist-to-hip ratio, and systolic blood pressure, which dropped an average of 10 points.
“These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect,” the pair wrote in the ensuing paper, published in Psychological Science in 2007. Crum may have been the first author, but the paper’s restrained academic tone didn’t come close to capturing the wonder she felt. “It really opened the floodgates,” she says. “If placebo-like effects matter in shaping the benefits of exercise, where else are they playing a role that we’re not paying attention to?”