The amazing power of fake surgery

Not only are miraculous (placebo) pills, medical experts have recently discovered the incredible power of "surgical surgery" for the treatment of spinal fractures.

In the past few years, there is growing evidence that placebo methods (using harmless substances to reassure the sick, rather than healing) can be extremely effective, especially in treat pain, depression and even improve some symptoms of Parkinson's disease.

Recently, Dr. David Kallmes, a famous radiologist at Mayo Medical Center (USA), one of the leading hospitals in the world and a place where US presidents often go for medical examination and treatment, even has discovered the unexpected effect of "fake surgery" on the treatment of spinal fractures .

For the past 15 years, Kallmes has been treating back fractures with a vertebroplasty , a method of pumping a special type of medical cement into a broken bone. He found that this treatment was very effective.

However, he began to doubt what really happened, because some patients' condition seemed to improve even when the surgery took place in a serious wrong way, that is when The doctor injects "wrong" cement into another vertebra. Dr. Kallmes concludes, there are certainly many other factors that determine the effectiveness of vertebroplasty .

Mr. Kallmes finally made an unusual decision: to test whether the vertebroplasty method works like a placebo. In particular, some patients with vertebral fractures underwent vertebroplasty surgery as usual, and in some cases only received "fake surgery" . Patients for each treatment completely selected by the computer randomly.

Every stage of preparing for patients, from preoperative to surgery, the local anesthesia injection is the same. Even the case managers do not know if they will perform real or fake surgery.

The results showed that there were no major differences in the level of pain relief as well as the improvement of the spinal function between the patients with real surgery and the patients who only underwent "false surgery".

The same effect was obtained in a study by another Australian researcher. Again, fake surgery proved to be as effective as the vertebroplasty method.

According to Dr. Kallmes, this does not mean, "fake surgery" directly healed the broken bones of the patient. Instead, this method works effectively by freeing patients from their pain long enough for bone to heal itself then naturally.

The discovery was shocking for the medical community, because so far, doctors around the world have performed vertebrplasty surgery for more than a million patients. However, experts warn, unable to conclude, fake surgery will also work well for other medical conditions, such as getting removed from the tumor.

Scientists admit, there are many things we do not know about the method of placebo or surgery as well as their mechanism of operation. Why do some people respond so well, while others do not, or do our genes play a role in the operation of placebo / surgery, . are beginning to become targets? Learn by researchers.