My Plan For Health

…And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Today’s TIME.com Wellness blog details a study on the placebo effect. Researchers may have pinpointed the parts of the brain that cause people who are sick or in pain to feel better, even when they are given a sham treatment.

Personally, I’m a big believer in what I call the “anti-placebo” effect: when I’m so certain that a treatment is a sham that it won’t work on me, no matter what! I refuse to get better!

The TIME story got me to thinking about alternative medicine, and why some people feel relief of symptoms such as pain when using alternative treatments which have proven to be no more effective than placebo in clinical trials.

I’ve been meaning to share a study on acupuncture that Noel Cressie forwarded to me, and this post gives me the perfect opportunity, since the acupuncture study says something about the placebo effect.

Here is the WebMD story he forwarded. A study found that real acupuncture (the study treatment) was no better than simulated acupuncture with a toothpick (the placebo) at treating back pain. The shocker: people who supplemented their normal back pain treatment with either kind of acupuncture (real or fake) were more likely to feel better.

That is, 40 percent of people who took pain medication and did physical therapy felt better, and 60 percent of people who supplemented their pain meds and physical therapy with real or fake acupuncture felt better.

An important point: Everybody in the study received the basic standard of care for back injury, which includes pain medication and physical therapy. The way the WebMD article is written — with the sub-headline “Acupuncture Trumps Standard Care for Back Pain Relief” — suggests that acupuncture alone caused 60 percent of people to feel better, when this is not the case. Rather, adding acupuncture to the standard level of care boosted the success of treatment by 20 percent.

You can find the researchers’ original journal article here, and a related paper which explains the treatment in detail here.

The researchers speculated that perhaps the acupuncture made people feel better because of the placebo effect. People seem to feel better just knowing that they’re doing something that might treat a symptom. And let’s face it, when the symptom is pain, people can be very flexible in what they are willing to do to make it go away — me included.

I have used meditation to control pain.

How can I tout an alternative treatment, you may ask, when I am a woman of science?

Well, yes, I am a very analytical person. And, yes, I’m always going on about “peer reviewed” this and “randomized clinical trial” that. But I am not opposed to some health practices that would normally be considered alternative, such as meditation, when they are used properly in addition to standard medical care.

I am not opposed to these alternative treatments because I am absolutely certain that in those cases where they have positive effects, medical science will someday reveal the reason, and there is nothing mystical about why they work.

For instance, I look at meditation as just another way to train my brain.

When I underwent surgery to repair a broken foot two years ago, I downloaded this CD from iTunes. I listened to it every night as I fell asleep in the weeks prior to surgery. The idea was to think positive thoughts that would put me in the right state of mind to let my body heal itself efficiently.

After the surgery, I wanted to avoid taking narcotics because they give me migraines. When I went home, I did not take my pain meds.

As you may imagine, I woke up the next morning in what was probably the worst pain of my life. You can bet I reached for my meds then! But I remembered what the surgeon had told me: once people start to feel pain, it takes a long time to shut the pain off, regardless of taking medication. He predicted that if I avoided taking my meds, they wouldn’t take effect for a couple of hours after I finally took them.

I needed a distraction — any distraction! — until those meds kicked in. So I played my CD. The familiar words and music drew me in, and by the time those 40-odd minutes were up, I realized that I was in a lot less pain.

Did the CD lessen my pain because it distracted me? Or because I desperately hoped that it would work?

You know what? I don’t care. But I know researchers are working on it.

Reader and FSFP water aerobics compatriot Susan just posted a comment on my review of the Healthy Grocery Lunch & Learn asking for recipes. You can scroll down here to read my reply to her for some suggested resources, but below is a list of recipes that I happened to put together for a friend recently. These are favorites around the Gorder household. If you try them, let me know how they turn out.

1. Tex-Mex Lasagna (could be vegan if you use soy cheese). Really easy to make. I like to put it together the night before we have guests, and then cook it right before they arrive. It stores very well.

2. Orange rice (recipe calls for cooking the rice in chicken stock, but you can use vegetable stock with no problem). I’ve played around with this recipe a bit by using pineapple instead of mandarin oranges, and it turned out tasty! I just cook it in the rice machine (without the pork chops, of course).

3. Pasta with Szechwan Peanut Dressing. Highly addictive! If you are interested in vegetarian cooking in general, I highly recommend the book this comes from: The 15-Minute Vegetarian Gourmet by Paulette Mitchell. It’s the first cookbook I ever owned, and the most loved. It describes all the different grains, and different kinds of tofu, and how to make sure you get enough protein, etc. Technically, it’s a lacto-ovo vegetarian book, meaning that some of the recipes use real milk and eggs. I substitute “fake” peanut butter made from yogurt to reduce the fat in this one.

4. Quinoa Pie with Butternut Squash. Insanely complicated recipe, ’cause it’s from Martha Stewart. But tasty.

5. Smoky White Bean Soup

6. Creamy Porcini Barley Soup

7. Ginger sauce

A few comments:

• One of the things that the dietitian stressed during the Lunch & Learn is that spicing food is a good way to add flavor without adding fat and calories. The orange rice recipe above is from Penzeys Spices, and I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to live in a city with an actual Penzeys store. You should go there. It’s like an amusement park for your nose.
• Cooking healthy does not necessarily mean cooking vegetarian. This is just the route that I have elected to follow, and I don’t even follow it religiously. I still eat meat once in a while, usually at restaurants. I just can’t remember the last time I cooked meat at home.
• I describe the quinoa recipe above as “insanely complicated,” and it is by my standards, since I tend to cook dishes where you just throw everything in a pot, and this recipe has multiple steps. But even if you don’t want to make it, it does give you one example of foods/flavors that work well with quinoa.

Have any recipes to share with me? Send them along, or leave them in the comments below.

Just got this tip from the Office of Human Resources: OSU employees may use all the Rec Sports facilities — including RPAC — for free during Staff Appreciation Week (August 17-21). Here’s the low-down from the newly redesigned Rec Sports Web site:

Staff Appreciation - Rec Sports offering a free week in all facilities August 17-21

Recreational Sports supports Staff Appreciation Week by welcoming any Ohio State University employee to a free week Monday, August 17 through Friday August 21, 2009. During Staff Appreciation Week, any person with a valid university ID is invited to use the recreational facilities at no cost, including the Recreation and Physical Activity Center (RPAC) and RPAC Aquatic Center, the Adventure Recreation Center (ARC) on West Campus, and the Jesse Owens Recreation Centers. The Tom W. Davis Climbing Center and Outdoor Adventure Center will also be available, which are located inside the ARC. Staff may simply stop by the RPAC Welcome Center or the ARC’s front desk with a valid university ID and register for Staff Appreciation Week.

Even if you’re not interested in Free Week, it’s worth checking out the new Web site. There are some useful additions, including an easy-to-access daily facility schedule.

After attending the Lunch & Learn program “Knowing Your Medicines: How to Be an Effective Consumer,” I am both amazed at the number of medications available on the OSU health plan, and glad that there are pharmacists on staff to help us understand them all.

Amanda Bain, a pharmacist with OSU Managed Healthcare Systems, talked us through the prescription benefit plan. She pointed to an online formulary which lists all the drugs that are covered.

Most importantly, she listed some questions every patient should ask his or her doctor when taking a new drug.  Obviously, we need to know how often to take a drug, but Bain said that we should also ask what time of day to take it, and then ask why.

She gave the example of a patient who was taking a drug that caused her to take frequent bathroom breaks at work. Her doctor had told her to take the drug every morning, because he assumed that she wouldn’t want to wake up at night to go to the bathroom, but the patient didn’t know that. By talking to her pharmacist, the patient discovered that she could choose to take the drug at night, in order to avoid interruptions at work.

I asked Bain something I’ve always wanted to know, which is what to do when I miss a dose of a daily medication. How many hours have to pass before I should just decide to wait until the next day to take my normal dose? She said that, in most cases, if you remember to take the drug within 12 hours, to go ahead and take it. But it’s best to call the pharmacy or Express Scripts if you have any doubts.

I also asked about pain medication. Since I exercise nearly every day, I also find myself taking over-the-counter pain meds nearly every day. Bain said that if I am taking meds that often I should probably talk to my doctor about it. She also wondered if I was overdoing my exercise routine, and I’m pretty sure I’m not — the good folks at the Faculty and Staff Fitness Program have me covered.