When Pretend Surgery Healed Real Pain
Rea,
You know how a bandage makes a scrape feel better right away? Our bodies have an amazing ability to respond to what we expect will happen. This power of expectation can be so strong that it sometimes works even when the treatment isn’t real.
Back in 1994, Dr. Bruce Moseley faced a puzzling question. As a doctor for a basketball team, he performed many knee surgeries for patients with painful, swollen joints. But he wondered: was the surgery actually helping, or did patients feel better simply because they expected to?
Dr. Moseley had a bold idea. He designed an experiment with 10 patients who all had painful knees. On the day of surgery, all patients were prepared the same way. But only five received actual surgery. The other five received what doctors call a “placebo surgery” - Dr. Moseley made small cuts on their knees but didn’t do anything inside the joint.
What happened next was surprising. Six months later, all 10 patients reported much less pain - regardless of whether they had received real surgery or not. The patients with just small cuts were moving better and hurting less, even though nothing inside their knees had been “fixed.”
This small study showed something powerful about how our bodies work. Sometimes we can heal because we believe we will. The brain can release natural painkillers when we expect relief. The pain was real, and so was the relief - even if the surgery wasn’t.
Dr. Moseley’s experiment was just a small study with only 10 patients, so scientists couldn’t draw big conclusions from it. That’s why he went on to conduct a larger study with 180 patients. This bigger study confirmed what the small one suggested - many patients felt better after placebo surgery, just as if they had received the real operation.
These surprising results changed how doctors think about treatments. Now, new surgical procedures must be tested more carefully to prove they actually work better than a placebo. This has saved many patients from unnecessary operations and helped doctors understand the powerful connection between our minds and bodies.
The next time you get a scrape, notice how quickly it feels better after someone puts a bandage on it. That moment of relief might be your brain’s powerful healing system already getting to work - like a tiny doctor inside your head writing prescriptions for your body’s own medicine.
Love, Abba
