The Unpersuadables: Adventures with the Enemies of Science (7 page)

One claim is: ‘It is an undisputed fact that people [who practise pranayama] get cured of diseases that are normally considered terminal. The evidence comes from the clinical examination of patients of cancer, hepatitis and other serious diseases performed before and after pranayama.’

Another: ‘The presence of cows wards off many ailments; the touch and contact of one increases our vision and betters the eyesight. Every part of the cow, from its pure milk to its urine has healing and beneficial qualities.’

Another: ‘The celibate is never unhappy.’

Dr Capolingua emails me back, saying that the statements that she has seen are ‘surreal’ and ‘not based on science.’ When I speak to her on the telephone, she says, ‘His claims are potentially dangerous to patients because he suggests breathing provides cures to a whole range of diseases, which we know is not the case. Targeting a market of patients who are frightened and seeking some form of miracle is very unethical. It’s exploitation.’

Capolingua says that, contrary to what Harita told me, breathing deeply in an ordinary environment doesn’t, in fact, raise oxygen saturation. And when I tell her about Harita and her radiotherapy, she says, ‘That’s dangerous. To delay that sort of treatment can have a very significant adverse outcome on the patient.’ Of the book’s claim that out of 1,233 new Western medicines developed since 1975, only thirteen are useful in hot, arid countries she splutters, ‘Oh God, no, that’s rubbish’; when I read her a passage in which he describes how food we have eaten comes into contact with oxygen, she actually starts laughing. ‘That’s not how it works at all,’ she says. ‘These processes are well understood and he’s getting them wrong.’

All of which is useful to hear, but not entirely surprising. What intrigues me more is the remarkable scene that I witnessed on my final day at the Alexandra Palace. One ordinary middle-aged person stood up and joyfully announced, ‘I had severe arthritis and now I’m better!’ Another, ‘I had severe diabetes and now I’m better!’ Another, ‘I had high blood pressure for twenty-six years and I am cured!’

This went on for some time.

I was witnessing something that my experiences with the creationists
and the UFO-spotters did not offer. Results. Something that, at least in essence, is testable. And yet the miraculous proofs boasted of by Ramdev’s London followers – claims of healing that are reflected in the testimony of many thousands of Ramdev acolytes all over the world – cannot have been born of his science-bereft breathing. So what is the truth? What has really happened to these people to make them so convinced that pranayama was the agent that made them feel so dramatically recovered? I was to find my answer in some invisible forces whose nature came as a surprise: in the phenomenon known as the placebo effect.

*

The seemingly magical powers of placebos were first effectively noted during the Second World War by a Harvard professor of anaesthesiology who found himself in Southern Italy. Lieutenant Colonel Henry Beecher was working in a field hospital when he was astounded to witness a nurse who, having run out of morphine, instead injected salt water into a badly injured soldier – who apparently failed to notice any difference, feeling very little pain, and not suffering from the cardiovascular shock that might be expected of a man in his state. Months later, Beecher had the opportunity to dispense a placebo to one of his own patients. It worked. He made an ad hoc survey of more than two hundred gravely wounded men and was amazed to find 75 per cent of them bravely declined the offer of morphine even though, before hostilities began, he had known them to be as sensitive as anyone else to even minor pain. Beecher formed a theory. Perhaps, after experiencing the violent trauma of the battlefield, these fighters had developed a new psychological perspective. Maybe their blasted limbs and shrapnel-spattered torsos didn’t seem like such a big deal, after they had witnessed the grotesque deaths of so many including, very nearly, themselves. To Beecher, it seemed as if pain was affected, somehow, by perception. In 1955 he published a paper in the
Journal of the American Medical Association
on
‘The Powerful Placebo’
. Although it has since been demonstrated that
Beecher’s interpretation of the data
contained within the study was, at best, highly careless, it would go on to affect the practice of medicine forever.

Since the turn of the twenty-first century, placebo has been studied more than ever. It has been discovered that the anxiety dampener diazepam – also known as the multibillion-selling superhit
Valium – only actually works when the patient knows
that they are taking it.
Experts such as psychiatrist Patrick Lemoine
have asserted that between 35 and 40 per cent of
all dispensed medications
are actually ‘impure placebos’ – that is, they contain just enough genuine active ingredient so that doctors don’t have to lie about what they have prescribed, but not enough that will have an effect. A 1998 study by researchers at the University of Hull found that up to
75 per cent of the effect of
brand-name antidepressants such as Prozac might be down to placebo;
Professor David Wootton
of the University of York has written of one estimate that indicates that ‘a third of the good done by modern medicine is attributable to the placebo effect’; while an acknowledged world expert, the University of Turin’s
Professor Fabrizio Benedetti, has gone so far as to state
that ‘Placebo is ruining the credibility of medicine.’

An individual’s placebo response
is dependent on their conditioning (their experience of similar past events) and on their perception – their expectation of what will happen. This is why expensively packaged
brand-name headache pills
work better than their supermarket equivalents, even when the cheap ones are identical in their ingredients;
why zero per cent ‘alcohol’ can make you feel drunk
;
why completely fake drugs can benefit the symptoms
of Parkinson’s, arthritis, ulcers, hypertension, depression, panic disorders, sexual dysfunction and angina; why fake drugs can make
athletes go faster
,
for longer
and
with less pain
and
convince asthma sufferers they’re better
, even when they’re not. It is why
four sugar pills
work more effectively than two; why
sham injections work better
than sham capsules,
capsules work better
than pills,
big pills work better
than small pills; and why healing effects can be summoned from
complicated but useless electrical equipment
, pointless
electrodes in the brain
and an application of
smelly brown paint
. One study has even indicated that
the
unspoken thoughts
of your doctor
can alter the efficacy of pain-relief drugs.

More recent research suggests that the placebo effect might even work
when we know that our medication is pharmacologically useless
.
In one small study, Professor Ted Kaptchuk of the Harvard Medical School arranged for thirty-seven patients with irritable bowel syndrome to take an inert pill twice a day. Even though they were informed that the treatment worked only ‘through the placebo effect’, these participants reported almost double the improvement of a forty-three-strong control group, who received nothing. If this experiment proves satisfactorily replicable, it will suggest that even when we
know
a drug to be bogus, the very act of being treated, of swallowing something, of being caught in the ritual of science and authority and focused attention, can still trigger our body’s various neurochemical healing tools.

Professor Nicholas Humphrey
of the London School of Economics writes that the placebo response is ‘a trick that has been played by human culture. The trick is to persuade sick people that they have a “licence” to get better, because they’re in the hands of supposed specialists who know what’s best for them and can offer practical help and reinforcements. And the reason this works is that it reassures people subconsciously … so health has improved because of a cultural subterfuge.’

Professor Humphrey eloquently describes the trick of placebo but he also unwittingly provides the most reasonable explanation for Swami Ramdev’s healing powers that you might find. Of course, placebo effect is limited. It cannot shrink tumours, mend broken jaws or cure diabetes. But it can have remarkable effects on pain, for example, and inflammation, ulcers and anxiety. So when I ask myself why it is that reasonable, sceptical Aasha is convinced that her discovery of Swami Ramdev lifted her depression, I think I now know the answer.

Because it did
.

One sunny Sunday afternoon in May, I was murdered. It was a vengeful lover that did it – or perhaps an elder brother, I can’t exactly recall. I can, however, picture my attacker clearly. He was enormous and bald and had a hammer, with which he hit me several times in the throat. And then he killed the girl that I had been trying to protect; the girl I loved and who didn’t love me back. My murderer had mistaken us for lovers. I had tried to stop him as he attacked the beautiful brown-eyed girl for whom I had longed for years. But he turned his hammer on me. And within two minutes, I was dead. Did I mention that this happened in Germany? In the fifteenth century? In a past life that I am, only now, reliving? This bloody and rather surprising memory has returned to me in the clinic of past-life regression (PLR) therapist, astrological counsellor, linguist and noted voice-over artiste Vered Kilstein.

Although she refuses to reveal her age, admitting only to being in her ‘late, late forties,’ forty-nine-year-old Vered is prepared to admit that her work in the regression business stretches back for over a decade. It was the famous US expert Dolores Cannon who originally taught Vered the PLR method, and about its aim – which is to cure people of their physical and psychological maladies by hypnotising them and allowing their unconscious minds to drift into lives that they have lived before. ‘This process can allow great shifts in a person’s life,’ Vered says. ‘We can identify patterns of behaviour we’ve been repeating through lifetimes. Just seeing them is a release of that pattern.’

Vered’s office sits in a row of high-end businesses, next to a plastic surgeon and a cosmetic dentist. Her front door is identifiable by the enormous stone Buddha’s head that basks, bliss-eyed, beside it. Inside is a smart, calming room that is decorated with crystals, mystic books and a glass dodecahedron hanging off a bit of wood, which is on sale for £500. Vered herself is dressed in comfortably loose dark-green clothing and has hair that is perhaps best described as ‘excited’. It is long and dark and has been pinned about her head with a complex arrangement of clips and gives the impression of being frozen, mid-explosion. It is, in fact, exactly the sort of hair you might expect of an individual who boasts of official qualifications in ‘advanced past life regression’, ‘Jungian astrology’ and ‘de-hypnosis’. It is hair that has been told incredible secrets about the universe and is just bursting to tell you all about it.

‘I’m very aware of myself as being an entity of consciousness across lifetimes,’ she tells me, once I have sat down. ‘I’m one of the millions who are here to help people move to a new consciousness.’

Before she puts her clients under, Vered likes to spend some time counselling them, exploring the issues that it is hoped the regression might solve. The issue that I am seeking help with concerns the invisible force known as the placebo effect. As with pranayama, I am wondering if it might also account for the perceived success – and therefore the belief in – dubious therapies such as this one? After all, there have been some incredible tests that have suggested that the benefits of
all
forms of therapy may be down to nothing more than placebo.
For a 1979 study that has been widely replicated
, academics at Vanderbilt University in Nashville took fifteen patients who had been complaining of depression and anxiety and sent them to see various psychotherapists. At the end of their treatment, they showed no more improvement than a control group who had been seen by fake therapists who had received no training whatsoever. Other academics have shown that,
despite the fact that different varieties of therapy
are based upon competing concepts of mind, it doesn’t matter which one you choose to help you with your problems – they all have pretty much identical rates of outcome. Having controlled for the effect of what is known as ‘regression to the mean’ – a principle which, in this context,
speaks to the tendency of our minds and bodies to heal anyway, whether we seek help or not – these studies really do offer evidence that placebo may be the secret of all talk-based cures.

For me, this was not a staggering discovery. I was barely out of my teens when I saw my first therapist, and fought to kill the particular unhappiness that was possessing me. Back then, I was at the mercy of invisible forces of a different kind: I was in love and it was all too much. Every Monday evening, I saw my counsellor, in a room not too different from this one. I would tell her stories about the week that had just passed and stories from my childhood. Stories in which I was never the hero. It didn’t make me happy. After around two years, I stopped going. They wrote me a letter, urging me to recommence the sessions for my own ‘safety’. And I would return, several years later. When I came back, it was invisible forces, yet again, that drove me there.

None of which is especially helpful for Vered at this moment. So instead I mention the other thing that has been on my mind of late: that grey veil of non-specific
wrongness
that I can’t find a way to escape.

‘I sometimes find life too difficult,’ I say. ‘I feel as if everyone’s against me, like I’m doing something wrong all the time and I don’t know what. It’s exhausting. It gets too much.’

She purses her lips and makes some notes with a special pen that has a light inside it. It glows celestially down on her pad.