Dr. Christof (Christoph) Koch

So that's essentially your belief that finds its substrate somewhere in the brain.

Do you know this interesting study?

Another colleague of yours, Boris Heifetz, is a neuroanesthesiologist at Stanford Med School.

Tell me.

Came out a couple of years ago with ketamine.

So he looked at a subset of patients that had to go – this was, I think, nature medicine – that had to go to surgery, but that were depressed.

So they went to surgery because of hernia or whatever, the surgery.

But then he looked over many years only at people who were depressed,

on the MAD-RS code, you know, the standard scale, how you evaluate how clinical personnel evaluates depression.

And then he split them into two groups.

Both would get ketamine therapy, but during anesthesia, during full-level surgical anesthesia that they needed to do their surgery.

Okay, that was...

There was in addition to.

And so half the people, everyone got the treatment.

Everyone talked six hours with therapists and psychotherapists and with him.

He said, I held the hand of every one of these 40 patients doing anesthesia because I was the attendant.

And so the good news is the people under anesthesia who got the ketamine still got the typical drop, you know, that looks like there's a quick drop in the first couple of days and then it stabilizes.

The interesting news is the people on the other arm that didn't get ketamine also had this.

In fact, what predicted how the drop was whether you believe the extent to which you believe you got the ketamine.

So it's a beautiful example of if you believe something, it is more likely to lead to therapeutic benefits.