This is an excerpt from Dr. David R. Hamilton's new audiobook, Why Woo-Woo Works, The Surprising

Science Behind Meditation, Raky, Crystals, and other alternative practices.

You can listen to the full audiobook free for 14 days in the Hayhouse Unlimited Audio

app. Apple users visit hayhouse.com slash apple and Android users visit hayhouse.com slash google.

Chapter 1 Mind Over Matter

They're not getting better. They just think they're getting better. This was a typical sentiment

expressed by my pharmaceutical company colleagues when I asked for their opinion of the placebo

effect, a phenomenon that was particularly relevant to our work, given that the drugs we were

developing would be tested in clinical trials. This view was always offered amicably,

but it underlined the assumption held for decades that the placebo effect was all in the mind.

If a patient who had been given a placebo in a drug's trial got better,

it was written off as part of the natural course of their illness. It would have happened anyway.

A placebo is an inactive or dummy treatment in the form of a pill, injection, or device

that's administered in clinical trials to test the real drug or treatment against a control

comparison. As such, a placebo isn't designed to have any therapy to get effects on the

patients who take it. However, in reality, it often does, and when this happens,

it's because the patients believe the placebo is the real drug or treatment. It's their belief

that does the work. Belief alters biology. The placebo effect might appear to be an illusion,

but science has shown that belief itself has real biological effects. Admittedly, this does sound

a bit wooboo. However, wooboo is only wooboo in our mind until we know the science, and then it's

true wooboo. In fact, there's no question that belief causes chemical changes in the brain,

and these changes are dependent on what a person believes. For example, patients can believe

...