Placebo Response and the Power of Unconscious Healing

Placebo responses are automatic and unconscious and cannot be predicted based on conscious volition. Instead, they reflect complex interactions between the innate reward system of the nervous system and encoded procedural memories and imaginal fantasies. The placebo response contributes inextricably to virtually all therapeutic effects, varies in potency, and likely exhibits its own pathologies. The Placebo Response further considers that the critical elements required to provoke placebo responses overlap substantially with what most current psychotherapies consider to be therapeutic, i.e. an interpersonal dynamic rooted in concern, trust and empathy. The potential importance of training caregivers in how to optimize placebo responses is considered a crucial feature of both the art and science of care-giving.

"With the problems of placebo versus drug efficacy in drug research intensifying, the interest in this book could grow.""Pharma research views placebo as a contaminant, whereas this author sees it as an evolutionary biological positive, revealed even by ancient physicians (Hippocrates, Galen, etc.) and one that needs to be harnessed to enhance healing. Although such an idea has been proffered before, it has not been with the erudition and comprehensiveness of this author.""Dr. Kradin is an internist, pathologist and molecular biologist who is also a psychoanalyst, a unique array of assets that are not extant in any other writer on the subject of placebo. He distils the best of all these fields, yielding insights and evidence nowhere else elucidated.""This is a brilliant, one of a kind book that should be published."- Nicholas A. Cummings, Ph.D., Sc.D.,Cummings Foundation for Behavioral Health, Reno, NV

Richard Kradin, M.D., is a medical physician, immunologist, and psychoanalyst at the Massachusetts General Hospital, Boston Massachusetts, and Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has established expertise in mind/body medicine and is former Research Director at the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Boston, Mass. He has conducted clinical research in the immunotherapy of cancer and has authored more than 200 scholarly articles in the areas of medicine, including psychosomatic disorders and the placebo response.