Dr. Alia Crum

Like a fake pill magically makes you feel better.

But if you think about it, while the randomized control trial is good for testing the specific effects of the medication, it's...

you know, what we forget when we actually go out and prescribe the medication or in the practice of medicine, in the reality of medicine, when we take a pill, any effect of that pill is going to come not just from the drug inside, but from the belief that the pill is going to work.

So the total effect of anything we do, whether that's medication or what we eat, for example, is a combined effect of what's actually in it and what you believe to be true about it.

So this is really empowering, right?

It no longer needs to be, oh, is it the medication or the mind?

Is it, you know, the mind over matter?

No, it's mind and matter.

It's mind and medication.

So if you wanna heal, if you want to improve your symptoms, right?

Take the best medication we have if it's relevant to you, but also adopt useful mindsets about it.

I think one study that really helps to kind of make this, what I'm saying, concrete is this great study.

It was done by Cam Hansen and colleagues.

And what they did was they took people who had persistent migraines and they followed people as they got these migraines in their life.

And every time they got a migraine, they were given a pill.

Now, sometimes they were given the real pill, a Maxalt, which is an actual real medication for migraines.

Other times they were given a placebo, an inactive fake pill.

So like the original clinical trial, but they had a catch to it.

So what they did was sometimes when they were given the Maxalt, they told the people it was Maxalt.

Other times they gave people the real Maxalt, but they told them it was a placebo.