When the Allies were fighting to liberate Europe from Nazi control during World War II, the demand for morphine in field hospitals was extremely high, and it became scarce when battles resulted in heavy casualties. Sometimes, surgeries even had to be performed without anesthesia. On one such occasion, Henry K. Beecher, an American anesthesiologist stationed on the southern front of Italy, was preparing to operate without morphine on a soldier with very serious injuries. Then something incredible happened: one of the nurses injected the soldier with a saline solution and, to Beecher’s surprise, the soldier immediately calmed down. Not only did he barely feel any pain during the surgery, but he also experienced no cardiovascular effects. Apparently, “the saltwater acted as a powerful anesthetic.”
Beecher began using this new “trick” whenever he ran out of morphine — and it worked. After the war, back in the United States, Beecher dedicated himself to investigating the placebo effect more thoroughly: the mind’s striking ability to produce real changes in the body simply by believing in the treatment being administered.
Beecher reviewed 15 placebo-controlled trials of treatments for pain and other ailments. The studies involved 1,082 participants and found that, overall, 35% of patients’ symptoms were relieved by placebo alone. As a result of this work, in 1955 he published his famous article “The Powerful Placebo”, which would go on to become a classic, highlighting — among other things — the importance of placebo in medical research.
But Beecher wasn’t the first to use the term placebo. The first was T. C. Graves in an article in The Lancet in 1920. What brought Beecher recognition was his article “Ethics and Clinical Research”, in which he sought to draw attention to a weakness in research ethics, issuing explosive critiques to the medical community of his time about the need for clinical trials to be placebo-controlled and conducted using the double-blind method — now the standard protocol when testing the efficacy of a drug or vaccine.
But this wasn’t the only contribution of this ambitious and controversial anesthesiologist. If you want to know more, we’ll tell you HERE. 😉
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