EFT Tapping Technique: Demystifying the Placebo Effect.

The ideas we have been taught about the placebo effect are often myths. Casual observers have volunteered to me that the positive results from Pro EFT tapping technique are due to the placebo effect. What is strongly inferred is that the tapping doesn’t work. The other point that often follows is the person believes they won’t be helped because they are too smart to be fooled by the placebo effect. This article is to offer evidence on the nature of both the placebo effect and that of Pro EFT.

Myth number 1: Placebo is all in your head. Psychiatric text books teach us that naloxone reverses the pain relief caused by the placebo effect. Naloxone is an opiate antagonist. In medicine we use this drug to immediately reverse the effects of morphine when the patient has been given an overdose and has stopped breathing. The result is the patient begins breathing and feeling the pain that the morphine had been blocking.

Let me illustrate this with an experiment on people coming out of a wisdom tooth extraction. The nurse comes up to them with a syringe of normal saline and says, “Here is your morphine.” What happens next is the larger group of people tell the nurse very quickly this is the worst morphine they have ever had. The smaller group love it as their pain is relieved. This second group of people are experiencing the placebo effect.

The next part of the experiment is to have the nurse return to the group experiencing pain relief from the placebo effect. The nurse has a new syringe filled with a dose of naloxone and says, “Here is your vitamin shot.” In our experiment the people experiencing placebo based pain relief immediately begin experiencing pain again.

The placebo effect is maintained in the patient’s thinking as the nurse is still telling them that they have received morphine and a vitamin. What the naloxone has reversed is their bodies own opiate based pain relief response. The placebo effect is not in your head. It is a set of directions you are giving yourself to heal using your own internal systems. Your body does this healing in a more balanced way than any outside drug can ever do.

Myth number 2: The positive effects of tapping are just placebo effect. This article explains that the tapping has a significant impact when the placebo effect is eliminated by the design of the experiment. In this experiment both the control group who didn’t get the tapping and the experimental group who did tap said the same verbal routine as part of their treatment. Any differences would suggest the tapping of EFT or the Diaphragmatic Breathing were the cause of the difference. The study design also accounted for and neutralized the placebo effect using several other methods.

The experiment had subjects in both groups approach animals or bugs that terrified them, take a short 30 minute treatment, and then approach the feared objects again. When it came to how close they could approach and how much distress they felt, EFT was 3 to 4 times more effective than diaphragmatic breathing.

These positive effects remained in place 7 to 9 months later for the EFT group but disappeared for the non EFT group. This is significantly different from how placebo effect works. Something else is happening when EFT is applied that is not placebo effect.

Myth number 3: You have to be fooled into believing things that are not true before the placebo effect will work. In this recent study for Irritable Bowel Syndrome, the experimental group was told on the sly that the pill they were taking was, “just like a sugar pill.” The control group was given nothing. The third measure were the studies showing the effectiveness of the strongest IBS meds. The same percentage of improvement was experienced by both the group taking the strongest medications and the group who knew they were getting a placebo. It made no difference that many of the experimental placebo group stated they did not believe a placebo would work. Placebo works because you are making a whole hearted decision to heal yourself. Your conscious beliefs do not seem to matter.

It is not well advertised that very often in medicine the medications do not do any better than placebo. This experiment also illustrates that the decisions to do something to heal yourself is often all that is required. Initiating placebo effect within your body is a skill, not an act of idiocy.

Myth number 4: Real medicine always gives better results than using a placebo. In this series of trials placebo effect was equal to the med 52% of the time. In the 5 original trials of Prozac placebo was more effective in 3 of the 5 trials. The drug was approved by the FDA because it only has to beat placebo in 2 trials to win approval. The FDA is unconcerned as to whether or not the average result is better than placebo.

Placebo effect is an integral part of how all medical drugs work. In the case of Prozac, the evidence is that there is no antidepressant effect independent of the placebo effect. All drugs appear to have a mixture of placebo effect and drug effect in combination in order to get the total effect. In sophisticated drug trials, there is even a group that only can access the placebo effect for themselves if they experience unpleasant side effects from the medication. Otherwise they do not believe the med is working. Without placebo effect factored in as part of the total effect many medications wouldn’t work at all.

Arthroscopic knee surgery was tested by not doing surgery on the experimental group. The experimental group just had incisions on their skin but no surgery was done inside the knee joint.  The same number of people healed their knee pain from not getting the surgery as from getting the surgery. This is yet another case where our ideas of why a procedure works are powerful enough to cause a significant number of us to heal ourselves. There are many treatments done in conventional medicine that have never been tested against placebo. As noted above there are many treatments that continually test as no better than placebo that continue to be administered to the public.

Myth number 5: Placebo effect fails most of the time because it is not real: This myth is half true. Attempts to get a placebo effect working on purpose often fail. The reason placebo fails so often is that the nocebo effect is 3 to 4 times more powerful. That is why many of us do not experience the placebo effect at will.

Wonderful results happen with Pro EFT tapping technique because we first reverse the nocebo effect. The term nocebo is unknown to most doctors I have spoken to about this effect. The nocebo effect is caused by what EFT calls Core Issues. Core Issues are the hard wired memories, beliefs, and emotional distress which direct our bodies to become stressed and sick. The act of our Core Issues making us sick is called the nocebo effect.

In the version of EFT known as Pro EFT we are highly trained in how to eliminate Core Issues. Eliminating the nocebo effect is part of how Pro EFT works. Adding in placebo effect as a second step is another aspect of how Pro EFT works. It is the combination of multiple mechanisms of action that make Pro EFT tapping therapy so effective.

Lasting results are the real measure of a treatment’s effectiveness. View this study where 86% of the EFT group lost the diagnosis of PTSD after 6 sessions. It stayed gone in the followup testing without further treatment. By comparison the control group had a remission rate of 4% after 6 sessions of psychotherapy. These kind of results were completely unheard of before the advent of EFT. This is why you can find EFT practiced at so many VA and military medical clinics in the last few years.

The study design above kept the number of sessions to just 6. I often find that 9 or 12 is the number needed to eliminate a series of traumatic events. This 86% is a low number compared to what could be achieved with an adequate number of sessions designed around the needs of each individual person.

Pro EFT tapping technique uses the placebo effect together with many more effective mechanisms of action to provide the relief you want. If you would like these kinds of results in your life,  contact me to set up your package of sessions today.