The Mello Institute for Advanced Placebo Studies

The staff at Milo Mello Enterprises is pleased to announce the grand opening of the Institute for Advanced Placebo Studies. For once the most tested pill in the world is gaining recognition as a treatment in its own right. It hasn’t been easy. Even now Wikipedia defines a placebo as a sham treatment. What a shallow definition. Placebo might be a treatment that is not currently understood by the scientific community but there have been too many successes over the centuries to call it a sham.

Placebo medicine probably goes back to the days of the shaman and tribal medicine man. Most, if not all, of the cures enacted by the “doctor” had no actual medical value. Members of the tribe recovered as a result of their faith in the treatment and the medicine man. These “treatments” survived until modern science proved that they had no meaningful effect. But is that a valid point of view?

Isn’t it possible that the treatments were effective as long as people had faith in their effectiveness? Modern medical science didn’t study the mental aspects of the ancient remedies and concluded that the treatments were worthless. When enough people believed this point of view, the procedure was rendered ineffective. People replaced their faith in the tribal medicine man with faith in modern science.

The constant in the healing process seems to be the faith. We have to believe in something. A recent article in “Wired” magazine claims that placebo is getting stronger. It found that most of the benefit of antidepressants is due to the placebo effect. Many modern drugs can’t pass the FDA trials because they aren’t significantly different from the placebo. Our minds are a powerful instrument of change.

It’s hard to say how many times the placebo treatment is better than the tested drug. We know when a new drug is released for sale and know that those drugs have proven to be better than the placebo. How many times does the placebo work as well as the drug? We may never know because companies have no incentive to keep track of these “failures.”

Interested readers can read Wikipedia or the “Wired” article for more information on these topics. Here at the Mello Institute for Advanced Placebo Studies, we are investigating the many ways that placebo can help us create a better life.

First Generation Placebo

We use this term to describe the placebos that are used in the drug trials. They are made to look like the medical treatment and are administered as if they were an active drug. Patients in the drug study can’t tell the placebo from the tested drug. Patients in these trials exhibit a significant improvement in their condition from the placebo. Doctors attribute these improvements to the brain playing tricks on itself. In weight loss tests, patients taking a placebo almost always lose several pounds during the test period.

Researchers tend to dismiss placebo’s effects as the tendency of some people to be suggestive. Overlooked is the power of faith in the operation of placebo. More importantly, the placebo gives us a glimpse into the power of the mind to create its own reality.

First generation placebos have very limited practical use. The drug companies manufacture them to look exactly like the tested drug. This is an expensive process and the placebo has only one use.

Second Generation Placebo

At the Institute we are working on new generations of placebos. Second generation placebos are pills that can cure conditions untreatable by any medicines. For instance, we can take an inert pill and tell test subjects that it will improve their personalities in a specific way. When we do the pre- and post-test, we find that a number of subjects have improved in the predicted way.

It would be possible to induce all sorts of behavioral changes with the right set of instructions prior to the start of a second-generation placebo test. While the ethics of such trials could be considered questionable, the results would mirror the results from more traditional drug trials.

It is also possible to induce negative reactions in subjects by telling them that these results are likely from taking the tested pill. This is called the nocebo effect. Once again, the ethics of such a test is questionable.

Third Generation Placebo

The Mello Institute is proud to be the leader in this field of placebo studies. Third generation placebos are inert pills for known medicines when the patient knows that the pill is inert. This is a quantum leap beyond the typical placebo. Most scientists believe that the power of the placebo lies in tricking the brain into believing that an actual drug is being used. We now know that our brains are so strong that we can bring about positive change even when we know that the pill is inert.

How does this happen? The secret lies in our ability to use our brains to create our reality. The pill is not the most important part of the formula. Our belief is the most important aspect of our behavior. Let’s use a negative example from animal studies to illustrate this point.

Scientists put a frog in a glass container and put a window on top of the container. When the frog is stimulated to jump, it hits the glass covering the container. This is repeated over and over. Eventually, the window can be removed from the container and the frog won’t attempt to jump when stimulated. The frog now believes that it cannot get out of the container.

How many times do we not act because we don’t believe we will succeed? This happens more often than we want to admit. We act as if our belief about the world is reality. While this has been a negative example, there are many positive examples as well.

One of our first test subjects lost 100 pounds in less than a year. How did he do it? He was no different than any one else except for one critical belief. One day he realized that he was killing himself slowly and he vowed to change. His belief never changed from that day forward. He had congruent behavior. All of his actions reinforced his belief that he could lose weight.

Fourth Generation Placebo

We are just beginning our studies of this area of placebo science. We classify a placebo as fourth generation when there is no known medicine in existence for the malady and the patient knows that the pill is inert. Because many scientists don’t believe that such an effect exists, there is very little information about this area. At the Institute we have not let such negative thinking stop us from investigating this aspect of the placebo effect.

Imagine how different the world would be if we could change any aspect of ourselves by taking an inert pill and having faith. We expect to have many exciting announcements in this product area over the next several years. To keep updated on these many thrilling discoveries visit our website.

The Future of Placebo

Is has only been very recently that medical scientists have taken a close look at the placebo effect. We have learned so much about this important medical miracle but there is so much more to learn. What are the possibilities? How powerful are our minds? When we throw off the constraints of the past and embrace the power of the future, we will begin to experience the life changing effects of placebo. All it takes is a little imagination.

Back to Top