[RADIOLAB INTRO]

JAD ABUMRAD: I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT KRULWICH: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And this is Radiolab, Season Three. And let me start with a story.

ROBERT: Okay.

JAD: an anthropologist Franz Boas goes to the woods of British Columbia. He has a giant wax cylinder recorder with him, and he records this guy singing a healing song.

ROBERT: Who is this?

JAD: This gentleman is an Indian from the Kwakiutl tribe and his name, we're told, is [Kesalid or Kesalid.

DANIEL MOERMAN: I've always pronounced it [Kesalid I don't know ... I'm not quite sure how it would be pronounced in Kwakiutl.

JAD: That's Daniel Moerman, he's an anthropologist. He's written a lot about Kesalid because it's a neat story. And it goes like this. The young Kesalid begins as a skeptic.

DANIEL MOERMAN: He was skeptical about the activities of the shaman. He thought they were tricking people in some way.

JAD: The shaman are the village healers. Very, very powerful men.

DANIEL MOERMAN: They were scary men.

JAD: And he'd see them doing these dramatic healing rituals. And he thought they were full of it.

DANIEL MOERMAN: And so he decided ...

JAD: ... To go undercover. One day Kesalid approaches some of these shaman and asks if he can apprentice with them.

DANIEL MOERMAN: Yeah, the three or four of them take him out into the woods, into a clearing or something, and they tell him a bunch of things. And they taught him the songs. And he learned that stuff.

JAD: And eventually, after he'd gained their trust a little, they taught him their best trick of all.

DANIEL MOERMAN: The trick that's widespread in the world of shamanism where you find variations on it all over the world.

JAD: "Here's what you do," they told him. Get some feathers, some down feathers, and just tuck it in your cheek right ...

DANIEL MOERMAN: Just stick it in your mouth.

JAD: Secretly.

DANIEL MOERMAN: So that nobody knew that it was there.

JAD: Then during the ritual, let's say the patient is there and they're on the ground, maybe their chest hurts. You lean down.

DANIEL MOERMAN: Literally, get down ...

JAD: Put your mouth on the patient's chest.

DANIEL MOERMAN: And suck.

JAD: And here's the last step. While you're sucking, you bite the inside of your cheek to get some blood in there, which mixes with the feathers. Then, at the pivotal point, you throw your head back and ... Cough out the feathers, which were now bloody and nasty.

DANIEL MOERMAN: So, you end up with this bit of bloody down in the palm of your hand, which you would then say is the disease which you have sucked out of the body of the patient.

JAD: Kesalid learned all this and thought, "I knew it. Those liars."

DANIEL MOERMAN: The problem was that part of the obligation of his apprenticeship was that whenever anybody asked, he had to go and treat them for free. That was sort of part of the deal of being an apprentice. And somebody from a famous family called him to come and treat a daughter who was sick.

JAD: Very sick, according to the written account.

DANIEL MOERMAN: And so he went to see this family, and he treated the girl and he went through the songs that he sang.

JAD: And then he did the feather trick, which he knew was false. He put the feathers in his mouth, bit the inside of his cheek, pretended to suck, coughed the whole thing out.

DANIEL MOERMAN: And lo and behold, she was healed. She was fine. She was ...

JAD: Fine fine?

DANIEL MOERMAN: Yeah, and it was a great success.

JAD: Wow. And what did he think?

DANIEL MOERMAN: Well, he clearly indicates a kind of ambiguity. He knows that he was tricking her but he also knows that she's better.

JAD: Not convinced, Kesalid tries the trick again and again and again. And every time he does it, it works. So, at the end of the story, he decides to become a healer. Does that mean that he ends up believing in the lie that he set out to disprove?

DANIEL MOERMAN: I think that he realizes that truth and lies are not that fundamentally different as we might think they are.

JAD: Today on Radiolab, we look at that. The true healing power of lies, which in medicine we call the placebo effect.

ROBERT: No. No, we don't.

JAD: What do you mean no we don't?

ROBERT: Well, it's actually called placebo, placebo.

JAD: Who calls it that?

ROBERT: Latin scholars, I think. I mean, it's a Latin word.

JAD: Whatever.

ROBERT: Placebo is originally a Latin word.

JAD: God. Alright, while you call it the placebo effect I'm going to try and figure out how it works.

ROBERT: And then I'm going to tell some stories including one about a dramatically dressed gentleman. He dressed entirely in purple, and maybe it was lilac, who used a placebo effect to make the ladies feel real good.

JAD: That's all coming up on Radiolab.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: [inaudible .

JAD: Dr. Benedetti?

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yes, speaking.

JAD: Can you hear me?

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: I am Fabrizio Benedetti, but I cannot hear anything.

JAD: We had a little trouble with the phone connection. Fabrizio Benedetti is a doctor at the Turin Medical Center in Italy, and he's one of the most expert experts on the placebo effect.

JAD: Is this better?

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yeah, now I can hear you, yes.

JAD: So we thought we'd start with him. He's been studying the placebo effect for about years.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yes. I got interested in the placebo effect because I realized that sometimes the Placebo group gets much better than the active treatment group.

JAD: Much much better?

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yes, sometimes. Sometimes.

ROBERT: For what kind of stuff?

JAD: Well, he saw it first in pain.

ROBERT: Pain?

JAD: Pain trials.

ROBERT: Oh.

JAD: And then he saw it in depression.

JAD: As in anti-depressants. Right, and then digestion.

JAD: Immune Response.

JAD: All of these places where placebos were doing things they just were not supposed to do.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yeah, it's really amazing. Particularly for some conditions like ...

JAD: And this one's a little surprising.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Parkinson's Disease.

JAD: Serious neurological disorder. People with Parkinson's have shakes, they have tremors. Dr. Benedetti treats a lot of these folks. And in the really bad cases, the only treatment that really seems to work at all is surgery.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: So this patient ...

JAD: You open up the patient's skull and implant a little stimulator.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Stimulator.

JAD: Deep into their brain.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Deep into the brain in two brain regions.

JAD: Essentially what that does is it hot-wires the parts of the brain that aren't working. And when you do that and you turn the stimulator on, the shakes go away. It's a real treatment.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yes. So, we can switch the stimulator on or off and the patient doesn't know that the stimulator is on or off.

JAD: And that is where the trickery comes in. In one experiment, he stood in front of his patient with the stimulator and said ...

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Now we are going to switch your stimulator on.

JAD: Except he didn't.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: No, of course. Of course, it is a sham turning on.

JAD: He only pretended to turn it on, but that's the weird thing. It didn't matter. Pretending to turn it on worked just as well as turning it on for real. The tremors disappeared.

ROBERT: Really?

JAD: He even has a video of this where he's with a Parkinson's patient and he says those words.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Now, we are going to switch your stimulator on.

ROBERT: Which is a lie, by the way.

JAD: Yeah, but it doesn't matter because what you see on the video screen is a shaking hand go completely still.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yeah, that's correct. In a few seconds, you see that there is a dramatic improvement in motor performance even though the stimulator is still off.

JAD: Just from words.

ROBERT: And this is an equivalency? The lie is as good as the medicine?

JAD: For a while.

ROBERT: What do you mean for a while?

JAD: Coming out of the gate, a placebo seems to be % as effective as say, a real Parkinson's drug.

ROBERT: Yeah.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: But it lasts only about % the duration of the actual drug.

ROBERT: Oh. Oh.

JAD: Still, it's just words. Come on. Words are cheap.

ROBERT: Yeah, your words are cheaper than ...

ROBERT: %? That is so different from %.

JAD: I never said it as %. I didn't.

ROBERT: You did too. Roll the tape [inaudible .

JAD: What is wrong with you? The fact that it happens at all. That words, that's what we're talking about. Words can be as effective as surgery. Doesn't that intrigue you? Don't you want to know how that works?

ROBERT: Yes, actually. I do. How does it work?

JAD: We have no idea. But for the first time, we can see it.

ROBERT: See what?

JAD: Well, see it in action. See the placebo effect in action. Testing testing. Dr. Benedetti referred us to a guy actually right here in New York.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: In New York, probably, you have talked with Tor Wager?

JAD: No. Should we?

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Yes.

JAD: Tor Wager, are you?

TOR WAGER: [inaudible Yeah.

JAD: Hey, how are you?

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Tor Wager is a very good neural imager.

JAD: Well, you should introduce yourself.

TOR WAGER: Okay. I'm Tor Wager. I'm assistant professor of Psychology at Columbia University.

JAD: And here's what Tor Wager does. He puts subjects in the brain scanner, puts a hot pad on their arm, like I'm doing to you right now. It's getting hot, right? Right?

ROBERT: So, that's very ... Yes, it's quite hot.

TOR WAGER: We'll give them these pulses of heat.

JAD: Ow. And then he'll give you some pain relief cream.

ROBERT: Ah. This cream here?

JAD: Yes.

TOR WAGER: A cream that we tell you is Lidocaine. We say, "This is going to be really effective. This is going to block pain."

JAD: It's going to take away the pain. Really, it's just Vaseline, but you don't know that.

ROBERT: I'm having a hard time playing this role.

JAD: In any case, right as you're putting on this fake cream and feeling better, having a placebo effect in other words, he takes a picture of your brain.

TOR WAGER: So, I have many things I can show you.

ROBERT: Come on, Tor. Show it to him.

JAD: He does. He shows me one on his computer. It's very pretty.

JAD: Oh, now we have a brain in front of us.

TOR WAGER: [inaudible .

JAD: A brain scan of a person right in the middle of being placebo-ed, meaning that they've just been given the placebo cream and now they're expecting to feel better. Those expectations ...

TOR WAGER: The placebo expectations ...

JAD: First of all, they seem to start ...

TOR WAGER: Here.

JAD: In your forehead.

TOR WAGER: Kind of on the sides of your forehead, above your temples.

JAD: When you believe that you're going to feel better, the belief seems to live kind of near your temples. But then, once that belief is there, it seems to turn on.

TOR WAGER: Turn on this.

JAD: This other part.

TOR WAGER: The membrane.

JAD: He points to it on the screen. It's a little nugget deep in the center of the brain.

TOR WAGER: And what's important about this area is that it's one of the major centers for the production of opioids in the brain.

JAD: Oh. Opioids like opium, painkiller.

TOR WAGER: Yes, right. Like opium.

JAD: Opium, as in ...

ROBERT: Jad.

JAD: What? The greatest painkiller known to man. There it was inside our heads. Doesn't it strike you as weird, by the way, that that stuff actually is inside our heads? I can't get over that, that these illicit substances are actually inside us.

TOR WAGER: Right. Well, you know there's kind of a neat story about that.

JAD: And here is where Tor blows my mind right out my face, as he explains that every drug out there in the world, every single one, even the ones you see on TV are in a sense already inside our heads.

TOR WAGER: Your brain must have its own internal chemical.

JAD: The only reason those drugs work, he says, is because our brain has receptors for them and why would it have those receptors? Because it can already make them in house.

TOR WAGER: Every pharmacological agent or drug that there is, there is a chemical that's produced by your own brain that essentially does that thing.

JAD: That's ... Wait a second, internal pharmacy in there just stocked full of drugs.

TOR WAGER: Right.

JAD: And we just have to figure out how to unlock it in a way.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: We have a sort of, as you said, internal pharmacy. But we don't know why sometimes it does not work.

ROBERT: What? What does that mean?

JAD: Well, what he means is that the placebo effect, though it can be incredibly powerful, it's rarely consistent. It's hard to predict who's going to get a placebo effect under what circumstances. But just imagine if we could figure this out. We could have all the drugs we ever need without those nasty side effects.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Oh yes, absolutely. Yes. We are working a lot with drug companies in this direction.

JAD: What Doctor Benedetti is looking at now, which could be huge for patients with chronic pain, is to take ...

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: ... A toxic drug like morphine.

JAD: And gradually replace it with a placebo substitute. So, say on Monday, he would give you some morphine. And then on Tuesday, he'd slip in a placebo.

FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: And you get morphine again on Wednesday, and the placebo on Thursday, and so forth. In the long run, you can have a reduction of morphine by %.

JAD: Aha. And perhaps one day ... I'm sorry, I can't contain my enthusiasm, we won't need drugs at all. Maybe one day we'll have a little box that I can plug directly into my mid-brain, and I could just spend all day hitting the joy button. Joy. Joy. Joy.

Speaker : Joy. Joy. Joy. Joy. Joy. Joy.

JAD: Sorry about that.

ROBERT: Well, while we're waiting for your glorious drug-soaked future, you can do it much more simply by simply telling a story. I'll tell you a story about telling stories. How about that?

JAD: I have no idea what you're talking about.

ROBERT: Alright, well let me start. It's a story I learned from Daniel Carr.

DANIEL CARR: Daniel B. Carr, MD.

ROBERT: He told me about a guy who's really the father of placebo research. His name is Henry ...

DANIEL CARR: Henry.

ROBERT: Unangst.

DANIEL CARR: Unangst.

ROBERT: Unangst.

DANIEL CARR: Unangst is his original name.

ROBERT: German, as Doctor Carr will tell you.

DANIEL CARR: Which, given the poor quality of my German, I would roughly scan as meaning anti-anxiety or perhaps anti-pain.

ROBERT: This may be one of those cases where the name shapes the man.

DANIEL CARR: It may well be. It may well be.

ROBERT: Because even though he ends up changing his name.

DANIEL CARR: To Beecher.

ROBERT: Henry Knowles Beecher. He does go into medicine.

DANIEL CARR: To become a doctor.

ROBERT: And then during World War II, he joined the army as a doctor and found himself at the Great Battle of Anzio, where the Americans landed in Nazi Europe. And he was right there.

DANIEL CARR: He was on the beach. Bullets were flying. Soldiers were being killed. And some were being wounded.

ROBERT: And since Beecher was the doctor, it was his job to treat them.

DANIEL CARR: That's correct. The treatment at that time for pain, as it still is nowadays, was morphine.

ROBERT: One problem, though. Beecher's division was cut off from supplies and reinforcements, and he began to run low on morphine. He had to figure out which soldiers needed it the most.

SCOTT PODOLSKY: And he's talking to them and he's asking them about how much pain they're actually having.

ROBERT: And this is Scott Podolsky who's a doctor and a historian.

SCOTT PODOLSKY: And he would go up to these patient and say to them ...

Speaker : Soldier?

Speaker : Yes?

Speaker : As you lie there ...

SCOTT PODOLSKY: As you lie there, are you having any pain?

Speaker : Are you having any pain?

SCOTT PODOLSKY: Quote unquote.

ROBERT: So imagine, Jad, you're a soldier. You're lying there with shrapnel stuck in your gut.

SCOTT PODOLSKY: These were severe injuries.

ROBERT: And you haven't had any morphine for, I don't know ...

SCOTT PODOLSKY: At least seven hours previously.

ROBERT: Yeah, seven hours. So, what would you say?

JAD: What would I say? Well, I'd say give me some morphine. I'm in pain.

ROBERT: Well, you want to know something?

SCOTT PODOLSKY: The striking finding was that in % of them, they'd say ...

Speaker : No.

SCOTT PODOLSKY: No.

Speaker : No, doc.

SCOTT PODOLSKY: I'm okay.

Speaker : I'm okay. I don't need any morphine right now.

ROBERT: Three quarters of them said that.

JAD: Wow.

ROBERT: This didn't make a whole lot of sense to Beecher, because he knew about pain. Before the war, he ran a clinic in Boston. So, he would see people with bullet injuries and gut injuries, more or less the same kind of injuries he saw in the battlefield. But back in Boston ...

Speaker : Doc ...

ROBERT: They really hurt.

Speaker : Could I have more morphine, please?

Speaker : Nurse.

ROBERT: For some strange reason, says Daniel Carr ...

DANIEL CARR: The intensity of the pain associated with being shot was lower in the battlefield than in civilian life.

ROBERT: What could explain that?

JAD: Well, you know, maybe soldiers are just ... They're tough guys. They don't ... They suck it up. They don't ...

ROBERT: Well ...

DANIEL CARR: No.

ROBERT: No. Context. Context. That was Beecher's very simple explanation.

DANIEL CARR: Context. Context.

ROBERT: Meaning that the pain that you feel when you're hit by a bullet, it's not just about the bullet. It's just as much about the story that comes with the bullet. So, consider these two different stories.

ROBERT: Story number one, you are a soldier and you've been shot. As the bullet passes through you, the first thing you think is, "Well, man. I'm shot."

DANIEL CARR: And second thing you think is ...

ROBERT: Wait a second. I'm alive.

DANIEL CARR: If I can be evacuated from here, I'll have a period of recuperation.

ROBERT: They'll take me to a hospital. There'll be nurses there.

DANIEL CARR: I may get a medal.

ROBERT: And a pension.

DANIEL CARR: Or a bonus. And I'll certainly be acclaimed.

ROBERT: They'll send me home. Throw me a parade.

DANIEL CARR: I'll be a hero.

ROBERT: Now, consider the civilian story. This time you're a regular guy, civilian, in Boston. Maybe you own a shop.

Speaker : Can I help you, sir?

Speaker : This is a stick up. Give me your money.

Speaker : Oh my god, no.

ROBERT: And you've been shot. As the bullet passes through you, this time the thoughts flashing through your head have nothing to do with glory.

DANIEL CARR: That's right.

ROBERT: Instead you think, "Yeah, I'm alive, but what's going to happen to me now?"

DANIEL CARR: You wouldn't get a medal. You were in trouble.

ROBERT: How am I going to pay the doctor bills?

DANIEL CARR: Going to be out of commission.

ROBERT: I'm going to lose my job. How do I pay the rent?

DANIEL CARR: And if your family was depending up on you, they suffered.

ROBERT: Nothing good is going to come of this. One bullet, two very different stories. And it's the difference in the stories, said Doctor Beecher, that explains the difference in the experience of pain.

JAD: Those stories you're saying are somehow filtering the pain even before it's felt?

ROBERT: Yeah.

DANIEL CARR: That even as the bullet enters the skin ...

ROBERT: Right away.

DANIEL CARR: Or within seconds thereafter.

ROBERT: You spin yourself a story about what's going to happen to you next. Not consciously, but way down deep in your head. And the story you tell, that makes all the difference.

DANIEL CARR: Scientists currently view our whole identity as something that we construct. One fraction of a second to another. You are the unfolding of an ongoing narrative, but it's not just a narrative in words. It's a narrative that involves touch, color, odors. We use all those inputs to generate the next frame from the last frame.

JAD: Well, if that's true, let me talk for a second about color. He just mentioned color, right? Daniel Moerman ...

DANIEL MOERMAN: Yeah, okay.

JAD: ... Told me something really interesting about color and pills.

DANIEL MOERMAN: Cool colored pills. Blue pills or purple pills, as placebos, make better sleeping tablets than yellow or red pills, which tend to wake people up.

JAD: That's been shown?

DANIEL MOERMAN: Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's a whole ...

JAD: Okay. Take two pills that are the same, he says. Color one blue, color the other red. And the people that take the blue pill will sleep longer, they will sleep better than the people who took the red. This has been shown, he says, all over the world except ... and here's the cool part, except in Italy.

ROBERT: Italy?

DANIEL MOERMAN: Yep. In Italy, blue sleeping tablets have the paradoxical effect of being sleep inducing for women but not for men.

JAD: What? How does that work?

DANIEL MOERMAN: Well, I'm not really sure, but my speculation is that the Italian national football team is called Azzurri, which is blue. And so what blue evokes in an Italian man is the World Cup and soccer and screaming and hollering.

Speaker : [inaudible . Goal.

DANIEL MOERMAN: And it's hardly something that's likely to put them to sleep.

JAD: Whereas by contrast ...

DANIEL MOERMAN: Blue ...

JAD: For Italian women ...

DANIEL MOERMAN: Is the color of the virgin.

JAD: Oh.

Speaker : Ave Maria.

DANIEL MOERMAN: The virgin is, of course, always presented in blue. And the virgin is a very comforting and protective figure for women in Italian culture. Language and meaning are the most crucial dimensions of our lives.

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad. Robert Krulwich and I will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: This is Jennifer, from Tampa. Radiolab is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org.]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich. And this hour, we've been talking about the placebo effect.

JAD: Yes, about the power of belief and suggestion. And thus far, we've looked at it from the perspective of the patient. But certainly the doctor has a role to play in all of this.

ROBERT: And so I have a story to tell you.

ALBERT MASON: Five, four, three, two, one, zero.

ROBERT: It happens to be about a doctor.

ALBERT MASON: Yeah, I'm Doctor Albert Mason, and I was trained in medicine in Guy's Hospital.

ROBERT: Back in the s, Albert Mason was delivering babies at a hospital in London. He was a young guy, an anesthesiologist. And he was looking for a new way to anesthetize his patients, the moms. Some of them may be safer than drugs. And one day, he ran across a book about medical hypnosis.

ALBERT MASON: Medical hypnosis. And I just read the technique and tried it out on some friends.

ROBERT: And under what circumstances? You would put a watch and have it swing back and forth, left and right?

ALBERT MASON: No. No. Just lay them down on a couch and say, "Now I want you to let your whole body go loose, let your arms go loose, let your legs go loose." And it worked on some people and not on others.

ROBERT: But the more he practiced, the better he got. Putting his friends under ...

ALBERT MASON: To a trance state.

ROBERT: Getting them to remember stuff from their fifth birthday.

ALBERT MASON: And all sorts of games that we played as medical students.

ROBERT: And so he took this little party trick into the delivery room, and it worked.

ALBERT MASON: That's right. I delivered about babies under hypnosis. And the moment you start to do hypnosis, you start to get a reputation as being somebody who has power.

ROBERT: Well, I would think you'd get two reputations. The patients might think you have power and the doctors might think you're a quack.

ALBERT MASON: Well both of those are true, but at that time it was kind of fun.

ROBERT: Because the hospital administrators were kind of curious about this young doctor slash hypnotist. Maybe he was on to something, who knows? So, they started to send him all kinds of patients.

ALBERT MASON: Skin disorders, asthma.

ROBERT: And he'd hypnotize them, which led to a weird little discovery. Of all things that hypnosis might help, the one that seemed to work the best was warts.

JAD: Warts?

ROBERT: Warts, yeah.

ALBERT MASON: To my delight, I found that if you hypnotized them and told them that the warts would go, they went in a certain number of cases.

ROBERT: Let's fast forward a little bit. Doctor Mason is treating lots of these warts patients and things are going pretty well.

ALBERT MASON: And one day, a young boy came to this hospital. He was wheeled in on a gurney, and the first thing I saw was his arm. I could have dropped through the floor because this wasn't a dozen warts. This was millions. This was the entire surface of the skin. It's cracked and got infected and his life was impossible. He couldn't go to school because he smelled. Now, I don't know if you've ever seen the photographs of this boy.

ROBERT: Just check this out. Look at these pictures here.

JAD: Oh my god. It looks like he has a black hide over his whole body.

ALBERT MASON: It looked like an elephant skin. That's what it looked like.

JAD: Geez.

ROBERT: Yeah, well, so they take this poor boy to surgery.

ALBERT MASON: The surgeon, a man called Jerry Moore was trying to graft healthy skin onto the hands and when I saw the skin, I said to him, "Mr. Moore, why don't you treat him by hypnosis?" And he looked at me and he said, "Well, why don't you?" And he walked out.

ROBERT: Was he ... "Why don't you" in despair or in contempt?

ALBERT MASON: I think a mixture of both.

ROBERT: And by the way, when you asked that question, you're the kid asking the senior practitioner, so ...

ALBERT MASON: I was cheeky.

ROBERT: Yeah, you were a little cheeky.

ROBERT: So there's Albert Mason, cheeky, alone with this boy with a million warts and Albert asks him, "Do you mind if I hypnotize you?"

ALBERT MASON: And this kid who was said, "Okay."

ROBERT: Didn't you have to tell the parents?

ALBERT MASON: No. Couldn't have got away with it today, could I? So, I hypnotized this kid. I told him, "The warts on your right arm will shrivel up and die, and new skin will grow, which ..."

ROBERT: And why did you choose the right arm?

ALBERT MASON: Oh, I had to start somewhere. And I sent him away. He came back in a week, and one arm was clear.

ROBERT: Totally clear. I mean, imagine this. The left arm is black and scaly like elephant skin. And the right arm is totally normal.

JAD: Totally normal looking?

ROBERT: Yes. Well, here's the photo.

JAD: Come on.

ROBERT: No, look. No, it's a real photo. This is verifiable.

ALBERT MASON: It looked like a normal skin, but rather pinker than usual. Slightly pink. And soft and supple.

JAD: Whoa. This is for real?

ROBERT: Yes. It's like all those thousands and thousands of warts that covered the right arm, I guess they just fell off.

ROBERT: And what were you thinking when you first saw it?

ALBERT MASON: I was thinking how wonderful. I was thinking, "Oh, wait 'til Mr. Moore sees this."

ROBERT: So, he takes the boy. He runs down the hall to the operating room when Mr. Moore is in the middle of an operation. He takes the boy up to the big, the glass window.

ALBERT MASON: And I held up both his arms.

ROBERT: One black and scaly, the other pink and raw.

ALBERT MASON: And Moore put down his scalpel. He came out of the theater. And he looked and he said, "My god. Look at that." And I said, "Well, I told you warts could go ... " And he looked at me pityingly. He said, "This isn't warts. This is congenital icthyosiform erithrodermia of Brocq."

ROBERT: Well now, for those of us who are uninitiated, what is [inaudible ?

ALBERT MASON: It's a hopeless condition. Never been known to change.

ROBERT: The surgeon informed Albert Mason that he had just hypnotized away a condition that never once in medical history had been known to go away for any reason whatever.

ALBERT MASON: So he says, "We're going to take him to the Royal Society of Medicine to show him to all the dermatologists in London."

Speaker : Gentlemen, please take your seats.

ALBERT MASON: So Moore took me up there with the boy.

Speaker : Thank you, Dr. Moore, and to the Royal Society for this opportunity.

ALBERT MASON: And I demonstrated. First of all, I demonstrated how to hypnotize.

Speaker : Hypnosis is quite easily achieved. You simply lie the patient down and say, "Now, I want you to let your whole body go loose. Let your arms go loose. Let your legs go loose."

ALBERT MASON: And then I showed his arm.

Speaker : Please, sir, if you don't mind, raise both arms.

ALBERT MASON: They were staggered. In fact, the President ...

Speaker : Gentlemen, this is absurd.

ALBERT MASON: ... Said that it's inconceivable ...

Speaker : This is inconceivable.

ALBERT MASON: ... That this gets well, because ...

Speaker : We all know that congenital icthyosis is incurable.

ALBERT MASON: Incurable.

ROBERT: That was the exact word he used. Incurable.

ALBERT MASON: Incurable.

Speaker : Incurable.

ROBERT: Incurable. And the thing was since all this took place at a hospital, every stage of it was documented. There are photographs every step along the way. Before shots, after shots, closeups, all available to reporters. You could imagine what happened.

ALBERT MASON: It was picked up in every newspaper, Time Magazine.

ROBERT: Big media story.

ALBERT MASON: In fact the first I heard about it, I was in bed one morning a year after I'd sent the paper in for publication. And the phone rang, and a voice said, "This is Whipsnade Zoo. We have an elephant with a skin like a little boy. Can you cure him?" And I said, "What the ... What the hell are you talking about?" And then the phone started to ring and ring and ring and hundreds of calls, hundreds of letters came in from all over the world. And I had people coming in with the most terrifying illnesses wanting to be cured.

ROBERT: Especially people with that very rare skin condition.

JAD: Congenital icthy ... Whatever it's called?

ROBERT: Yes. They flocked to him from all over the world, and that's ... Now, here's where the story takes a turn. He would see these patients. He would hypnotize each one, one at a time, and then send them away hoping, of course, that they'd get better. And they would come back a week later and ...

ALBERT MASON: None of the others ever got well.

ROBERT: At all?

ALBERT MASON: No.

ROBERT: Not in any way?

ALBERT MASON: No improvement. I've spent the rest of my life trying to understand this phenomenon, because I gave up anesthesia ...

ROBERT: Just a few years later, Albert Mason quit medicine and he decided to become a psychiatrist. He wanted to understand why he had the touch the first time and why after that, it just didn't work. So the central question in your mind was not what happened to the kid, but what happened to me?

ALBERT MASON: That's right. That's right.

ROBERT: And what do you think the answer to that is?

ALBERT MASON: Well, there is a condition called infantile omnipotence, that we all suffer from when we're kids. We think we can do anything. Unconsciously, I knew this was incurable.

ROBERT: Wait, wait, wait, wait a second, because incurable would mean that it had never been cured. But you had just ...

ALBERT MASON: That's right. That's right.

ROBERT: You had just created an exception. So ...

ALBERT MASON: Look. When you're and the President of the Royal Society of Medicine tells you it's incurable, it has an effect.

ROBERT: That's his best guess. He thinks that that word, incurable, changed him. Just a little bit.

ALBERT MASON: I lost my crazy confidence, even though I had the evidence. But it didn't work.

ROBERT: Confidence is a hard thing to measure. You can't put it on a scale. You can't weigh it, but you can sense it, because it's conveyed in a million little ways. How you stand, whether you look your patient in the eye, when you pause, where you pause, what you say, what you don't say. All these things are like signals. They say to the patient, they murmur to the patient, "I can help you. I can do this."

ALBERT MASON: You know, you go to a doctor, and you've got this horrible rash all over you. And he says, "Oh, that's erythema multiforme." And you feel better immediately, because he's named it. Well, all he said is, "many red spots" in Latin. But the thing is that he knows what it is and you feel that, "Oh, he knows. Now, I'll be okay."

ROBERT: Because when you're feeling terrible, what you just want to do is hand over the authority for you situation to someone else who's got information, power ...

JAD: Yeah, and who's going to tell you you're going to be fine.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And maybe that comes out from early childhood when it seems to us that our parents have that capacity.

JAD: Harvard historian, Anne Harrington.

ANNE HARRINGTON: I have a two year old and we're already now at the stage where he gets a little bump and he comes to me and holds the bit of his body out that's been hurt and I kiss it. And it's okay. And there is a way that mommies is kind of a placebo effect.

JAD: Testing testing.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And now imagine that you're sick. You know when you're sick, there's a strong impulse to kind of revert back to that way of interacting with people.

JAD: Yeah, say something just to ...

JAD: That's Arabic for "what do you want?"

NAJI ABUMRAD: Hi, Jad. How are you?

JAD: I'm good, Dad. How are you?

NAJI ABUMRAD: I'm doing very well.

JAD: This is my dad. Do you see how your voice goes on the thing? He's the guy that I would bring my boo-boos to as a kid. Tell me what you do. Actually, I still do ... Your title, and that kind of thing ... Because he happens to be a doctor.

NAJI ABUMRAD: I'm the Chairman of the Department of Surgery at Vanderbilt.

JAD: Vanderbilt is in ...

NAJI ABUMRAD: Nashville, Tennessee.

JAD: Where we grew up for much of our life.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Where you grew up for much of your life.

JAD: Okay, so my dad had no idea why I wanted to follow him around the hospital. I didn't exactly lead with the whole placebo thing. The truth is I feel okay about that, because this show isn't really about lying. It's about healing. The healing process, which doesn't happen in a vacuum. Patient, of course, has to believe in the cure. But the doctor has to create that belief.

JAD: Okay, wait. You have to walk slower.

NAJI ABUMRAD: I can't walk slowly.

JAD: And how does he do that? Wait. Tell me where we're going now.

NAJI ABUMRAD: We're going to the clinic.

JAD: Be more specific. What happens at the clinic?

NAJI ABUMRAD: I have patients scheduled to come and see me today.

JAD: These days my dad's hair is as white as his white doctor coat, but he still sees patients every Wednesday.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Today, I have four patients.

JAD: And that is why I'm here. One PM, clinic begins.

NAJI ABUMRAD: We are in the clinic.

JAD: And as if to illustrate Anne Harrington's basic point ...

ANNE HARRINGTON: When you're sick, there's a strong impulse to kind of revert back to that way of interacting with people.

JAD: As soon as my dad's first patient shows up, a hair stylist from Murfreesboro, Tennessee who, when she walks down the busy hallway and sees him, as soon as she sees him, she bursts into tears.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Why are you crying?

MEGAN: Because I ... I don't know. Just scared.

JAD: He gives her a hug.

MEGAN: Every time I see him, it's kind of like I hold ... I have to be strong, and I feel like when I see him, I can let it down because I know that he's going to hug me and make me feel better.

MEGAN: I'm a single parent and I own my own business, and I've always been in survival mode. And I've always had to be strong. And so that's why this has been so hard for me.

JAD: They go into a tiny exam room, which is quiet and super intimate compared to the hallway. Dad has Megan sit on a table.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Lift up.

JAD: And he gently presses two fingers to her neck.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Swallow a little bit. [inaudible .

JAD: There's a tiny gland in her neck that should be the size of a pea.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Just nod your ...

JAD: But over the past four years, it's gotten bigger.

NAJI ABUMRAD: ... Is now three inches ...

JAD: And bigger.

NAJI ABUMRAD: ... Wide and two and a half inches in the other direction.

JAD: Now, it's the size of a golf ball. And it presses against her airways.

MEGAN: At night, sometimes I wake up and I'm ... And I think, "Oh god. Should I call ?" And I keep asking him every week, "Are you sure I'm not going to choke?"

NAJI ABUMRAD: It's not going to choke you.

MEGAN: It's not going to choke me.

NAJI ABUMRAD: It is not going to choke you.

MEGAN: [crosstalk Just him reassuring me.

NAJI ABUMRAD: It's not going to affect the airway. It will not ...

MEGAN: I try to remember the little things that he says to me when I ... Especially in the middle of the night when I start feeling anxious or panicking. And in the meantime, how do I deal with the anxiety surrounding this thing, because I've got ...

NAJI ABUMRAD: Patients are anxious.

MEGAN: I'm having lots of anxiety, but I don't know ...

NAJI ABUMRAD: Scared of the unknown.

MEGAN: Part of it is worrying about the future. I think just because I ...

NAJI ABUMRAD: It's nothing to worry, Megan.

MEGAN: Well, I know, but I guess it's just because of my personal responsibilities.

NAJI ABUMRAD: We'll work with you. You got to put them at ease. There is nothing life threatening today. You have to put them at ease. I'm going to give you a short term plan and longer term plan.

MEGAN: Okay.

JAD: If medicine were just science, then all of this talk would be just noise because the real business would then happen in the next room where there's this big machine ready to scan Megan's thyroid. But medicine isn't purely science.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Yeah. I mean ...

JAD: Which my dad admits.

NAJI ABUMRAD: It's an art. It's communication.

JAD: Which is why he and Megan talk and talk and talk and talk for over an hour. In a way, it's a kind of negotiation. She wants to know one thing. What if my thyroid has gotten bigger? What if I had to have radiation? Will I have to quit my job? He needs her to focus on anything but the what ifs. To stay focused on what they do know, which unfortunately, is that they won't know anything for another day.

NAJI ABUMRAD: We'll draw the blood today and [inaudible or not, I'd know it within hours.

MEGAN: Okay.

NAJI ABUMRAD: I need to know the size of that thyroid, Megan.

JAD: Somehow in the end, despite all the open questions, he gets her to relax.

NAJI ABUMRAD: We're going to work together. We're going to work together.

MEGAN: Well, you got to stop going out of town so much. This is really inconvenient for me.

JAD: How much performance is in it?

NAJI ABUMRAD: What do you mean performance?

JAD: How much of doctoring is having to play a certain role that the patient needs at that moment?

NAJI ABUMRAD: It's just about every bit of it.

JAD: So, if I were to call it theater, would that offend you or no?

NAJI ABUMRAD: It's not a theater. It is ... I'm living that role. It's part of me. It's not part of a fake image that I'm projecting.

JAD: I think you know what I'm trying to get at.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Not really.

JAD: No? Well, it's just ...

NAJI ABUMRAD: Well, I mean ... You call it theater. You can call it theater, but ...

JAD: I just mean that ... When you don't have the white coat on and you're not in doctor mode, you don't have all the answers. You don't.

NAJI ABUMRAD: And I don't have all the answers then.

JAD: But you seem to, and particularly with her ...

NAJI ABUMRAD: No ...

JAD: That's what I really wanted to know. That magic pixie dust called certainty. How do you project that instantly to a patient the moment you walk into a room even when the patient hits you with questions like, "Doc, am I going to make it?" It can seem kind of mystical, that aura. But then again, there are the props.

JAD: Okay. You have to tell me what you're doing now. What is this?

JAD: For instance, to rewind a moment. Here we are before clinic in my dad's office. And he's just opened up his little coat closet.

NAJI ABUMRAD: Putting my coat on that I usually, on the day of the clinic, I choose a clean white coat.

JAD: Really?

NAJI ABUMRAD: Yeah.

JAD: Do you have many to choose from?

NAJI ABUMRAD: I have one, two, three, four, five.

JAD: Five? Five blindingly white, white coats. He flips through them, picks the whitest of the bunch, puts it on, and I swear to you even now when I'm older, supposedly wise to these kinds of things, it's like he changes somehow.

JAD: Do you ever go to see patients without your white coat on?

NAJI ABUMRAD: I don't like to. It's almost like you're naked without it.

JAD: You do seem taller with it on.

NAJI ABUMRAD: I do?

JAD: Yeah.

JAD: There is inherent power in the props, especially the coat. And if you have any doubt the doctors don't know this, go to a med school, any med school on the day the new students arrive, and you'll probably find something like this.

Speaker : Excuse me. If we could all have a seat. We'll start the ceremony.

JAD: The White Coat Ceremony.

Speaker : Thank you.

JAD: It's as close to religious ritual as you can get in medicine. And in fact, the one that we attended at Columbia University in New York ...

Speaker : I ask the students to please stand with me.

JAD: ... Included a chaplain.

Speaker : As you are able, let us pray together. Compassionate God, bless these new medical students of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, and bless the white coats that they receive today. May these white coats be for each student a cloak of compassion, a clear statement of purpose, a sign of assurance, and a symbol of respect.

ARNOLD GOLD: The ceremony ...

Speaker : We pray for the strength and for the ...

ARNOLD GOLD: ... At time has some almost spiritual component.

Speaker : ... and the art of healing.

SANDRA GOLD: It's quite moving, I think, I hope you'll find.

JAD: That's Arnold and Sandra Gold. They began the White Coat Ceremony at Columbia almost years ago.

Speaker : God be with each student.

JAD: And they were in the audience the day we were there.

Speaker : ... God be with each of us.

JAD: Along with about students and their families.

ARNOLD GOLD: First, each student is cloaked individually and called by name.

Speaker : Eric J. [Arius . James J. [Attra .

ARNOLD GOLD: They then return to their seats, and we see this visual transformation that occurs.

SANDRA GOLD: This is a change that you can actually see. These people come into this room with their coats on their arm, and they're wearing blue and black and green, and yellow. And that's who they are. And you see the room filling up in white, and they see the room filling up in white.

Speaker : Alexandra J. [Borst .

SANDRA GOLD: And you know, in the old days, doctors wore black.

JAD: It's true. years ago, doctors wore gothic black coats. But then someone discovered germs, and that the insight that germs live in dirt.

SANDRA GOLD: And because you couldn't see dirt on black ...

JAD: Coats had to be white.

SANDRA GOLD: They changed for antiseptic reasons.

JAD: And that is when a certain symbolism took hold.

SANDRA GOLD: When you think about angels, they're never in red. They're never in black.

Speaker : Please turn around to face the audience. And I present to you the Class of

JAD: Radiolab will continue in a moment.

[LISTENER: Hi. I'm Marley Duncan from Brooklyn, New York. Radiolab is supported, in part, by the National Science Foundation and by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, enhancing public understanding of science and technology in the modern world. More information about Sloan at www.sloan.org. Bye.]

JAD: This is Radiolab. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: And I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And today we are talking about the placebo effect. The power of suggestion. We're looking at a lot of new research.

ROBERT: I don't know about new research. We've done ... Well, it is new research, but the problem has been with us for centuries. Even at the very beginning of the age of reason. Let me take you back. th Century, the Enlightenment was in full swing. There was change in the air. Voltaire was denouncing the church.

ROBERT: Ben Franklin was flying kites. Lavoisier was inventing Chemistry. It was the beginning of modern times, modern science, you might say. Reason, inquiry. People were re-examining the big questions. How does the world work? What possibly could hold everything together? And this was new.

ED COHEN: Well, you have to understand that in earlier historical moments, the unification of the universe was not a problem, because it was God that unified everything and everything was a manifestation of God.

ROBERT: That's Ed Cohen talking about God. He's a historian.

ED COHEN: But if God isn't the glue that hold the universe together ...

ROBERT: Then what does hold the world together? Enter Anton Mesmer.

JAD: Who?

ROBERT: Anton Mesmer. Have you ever said, "You mesmerize me, my darling," have you ever said that?

JAD: I've said things like that.

ROBERT: The word mesmer, mesmerization comes from Anton Mesmer. He was a real historical figure. So, he's part of our narrative.

JAD: Oh.

ROBERT: Now, get out of my way. [inaudible . In he moves to Paris and he has a theory. He believes that the world was filled with a kind of fluid that moved through all living things. And he gave it his own kind of sexy name.

ED COHEN: Animal magnetism.

ROBERT: Or as they say in the French, "magnétisme animal."

ED COHEN: Right.

ROBERT: And as this force flowed through all of life, occasionally it would get stuck, like in a traffic jam. It would bunch up.

ED COHEN: Right. And that is also, the bunching up can also be a cause of a problem.

ROBERT: That's what he thought being sick was, blocking the flow.

ED COHEN: Restrictions in the flow of animal magnetism in the organism. I mean, not that dissimilar to the way that we understand traditional Chinese medicine.

ROBERT: You know, like qi, with the needles and the acupuncture. Mesmer thought that this life force, when it got stuck, could be released with a little help.

JAD: From needles?

ROBERT: No, no. His approach was lot more theatrical.

ED COHEN: He created a kind of salon. I actually think of it as a prototype for the idea of a happening in the s. That's the way I like to think of it. It's sort of like everybody kind of came in and there was this music playing. There was dim lighting, and he would walk around in his lovely purple suit and he had ...

ROBERT: Purple?

ED COHEN: Yeah, I think he was ... Lilac was, I believe, actually the shade that was reported.

ROBERT: And then he would go over to a particular client, usually it was a woman. Most of his clients were women. And he would ...

Speaker : Madame.

ROBERT: ... Sit across from them and their knees would touch.

Speaker : Your magnétisme animal, it is, how do you say [inaudible .

Speaker : No.

ROBERT: And then to unblock this flow, he would stare into her eyes, stare ...

ED COHEN: Right.

ROBERT: And if he unjammed you, how would you know?

ED COHEN: Oh, because you would have a healing crisis.

ROBERT: What was that?

ED COHEN: Simple, they would scream. They would vibrate. He had, actually, a padded room where the ladies could go and loosen their corsets and fling themselves about and bang their heads against the wall and do whatever they needed to do in order to kind of release the dammed up energy. It was apparently quite dramatic.

ROBERT: By the looks of it, they were real seizures. And people said they felt better afterwards. So, word spread and soon he had disciples and then more disciples.

ED COHEN: It had a lot of popularity, yes it did.

ROBERT: So, he did what any businessman would do.

ED COHEN: He franchised it.

ROBERT: He branched out, and I mean this literally. He magnetized trees.

JAD: Trees. What?

ROBERT: Trees. Mesmer, or sometimes his assistants, would take two magnetized iron rods, touch them to a tree in the forest, and that would transfer the magnetism to the tree.

ANNE HARRINGTON: The tree would then have the kind of therapeutic powers that a mesmerist would have.

ROBERT: How convenient. That's Anne Harrington, a Harvard historian.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And this was quite efficient because then you could sort of have the trees do part of the work for you.

ROBERT: So imagine, if you will, lots and lots of people gathered around a tree, touching each other and the tree and allowing the flow to move through them. And they would all have fits together. And the problem was the doctors of the time, who used to have all of these people as their patients, were now losing patients and money. So, they protested to the king.

ANNE HARRINGTON: The king established a commission. And actually one of the members of that commission was Benjamin Franklin, who at the time, was the ambassador to France. And there were other important scientists on the team.

ED COHEN: Majault, Sallin, d'Arcet, and Lavoisier, Guillotin was one of them.

ROBERT: Is that the guillotine we know from the ...

ED COHEN: Right.

ROBERT: So, we're talking here about a major, major league panel.

ED COHEN: These were big guys. Big names.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And they devised a series of experiments to test for magnetic force.

ED COHEN: They weren't concerned whether or not animal magnetism worked. They were concerned whether or not animal magnetism existed.

ROBERT: Because they figured it can work even though it may not exist.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And one of the most dramatic tests that they devised is sometimes identified as the first placebo control trial in history. They were actually down on Benjamin Franklin's estate.

ROBERT: This was just south of Paris, and Franklin himself conducted the experiment.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And it involved blindfolding a young boy.

Speaker : Is it on too tightly?

Speaker : No.

ANNE HARRINGTON: years old.

Speaker : Can you see anything?

Speaker : No.

Speaker : Any light at all?

Speaker : No.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And he was told that ...

Speaker : Now, here's the deal, young boy. One of these five oak trees ...

ANNE HARRINGTON: That one of the trees on the estate had been magnetized.

Speaker : ... has been magnetized by an actual mesmerist. We'll take you to one tree at a time. Your job is to tell us which one has been magnetized.

ANNE HARRINGTON: They said one of the trees was magnetized and we'll blindfold you and you tell us when you're up by the magnetic trees, because patients insisted that they could feel the energy. And by the way, I believe them. I'm totally persuaded that the real experiences were happening. They brought the boy to one tree.

Speaker : This is tree number one.

ANNE HARRINGTON: And he began to kind of shake and they brought him to another.

Speaker : Now, we stand before tree number two.

ANNE HARRINGTON: He began to sweat. And by the time they brought him to the third ...

ROBERT: And then the fourth.

Speaker : Here we are before tree number ...

ANNE HARRINGTON: He sort of collapsed in convulsions.

ROBERT: Which is all very dramatic, except tree number one, tree number two, and number three and number four had never been magnetized.

ANNE HARRINGTON: So, this was seen as pretty definitive evidence that there was no magnetic force here, but they also didn't think that the boy was sort of faking it. So, what they concluded was that there is no magnetic force, but that all the effects, which they don't deny the reality of, were caused by the imagination.

ROBERT: That was Harvard historian, Anne Harrington, and Rutgers historian, Ed Cohen.

JAD: Our final stop in this hour comes from reporter Gregory Warner, who recently visited a tent revival in upstate New York, a little Adirondack's lakeside community, very rural, to see a faith healing.

GREGORY WARNER: Okay, so I get there and I'm a little bit late and I'm a little bit nervous. There's a lot of mosquitoes. People are restless. They're sitting in their chairs. The tent flaps are still up. The sun is kind of setting and Steve, Steve Buza is going on about some verses of scripture, and people are really bored. And he says, "Don't worry, we're going to get to the healing pretty soon. The reading's important too." That kind of thing, teacher-like. So then he says, "Okay. Now it's time for some healing." The flaps go down and suddenly the space changes because what was before this kind of people milling in and out becomes this very focused chamber. And it begins.

STEVE BUZA: [inaudible ministry of any kind, come on up here.

JAD: This preacher, who is this guy?

GREGORY WARNER: That's Steve Buza. He owns a construction company in Syracuse.

STEVE BUZA: Anything at all that you need. Physical healings, finances ...

GREGORY WARNER: So, he's looking out into the crowd and then a volunteer comes up.

STEVE BUZA: Hi.

Speaker : Hi.

GREGORY WARNER: Strawberry blonde hair, pink cardigan.

STEVE BUZA: What do you need?

Speaker : I need my backbone straightened.

STEVE BUZA: You need your backbone straightened? Tell me what's wrong with it.

JAD: How old is she?

GREGORY WARNER: She's in high school.

Speaker : It's in an S shape.

GREGORY WARNER: He diagnoses her.

STEVE BUZA: Scoliosis. That's ... Don't let this scare you, now. I'm not trying to scare you. Scoliosis of the spine is % of the time demonic, okay. It's not even physical, it's a demon.

GREGORY WARNER: I'm standing next to Steve. And ...

STEVE BUZA: Do you believe it's going to be straightened right now? Give me your hands.

GREGORY WARNER: So, he spins her around.

STEVE BUZA: I break any generational curse off of my sister right now in Jesus' name. You spirit of Scoliosis, I break your power.

GREGORY WARNER: And then all of a sudden ...

STEVE BUZA: Go right now, you spirit. Leave now, in Jesus' name. Backbone be straightened in Jesus' name.

GREGORY WARNER: Just kind of shoves her forward.

STEVE BUZA: Straighten right now in Jesus' name. In Jesus' name. Try it now. Move around. Do what you couldn't do before. Stand back and give yourself plenty of room. Move it. Move it. Move it. Move it. Faith is doing what you couldn't do before.

GREGORY WARNER: I really don't want to say that she was healed or that she wasn't healed.

STEVE BUZA: How does that feel to you?

Speaker : Better.

STEVE BUZA: There's still pain there?

Speaker : No.

GREGORY WARNER: Because she was just crying.

STEVE BUZA: Because we're not going for % of this ... Is it % better?

GREGORY WARNER: But I did ...

Speaker : Yeah.

GREGORY WARNER: ... Meet a woman who, something ... I think something did happen with this other woman that I met.

Speaker : I need healing. I have ... I had an X-Ray, and they said there was nothing wrong with it, but my bone sticks out.

GREGORY WARNER: She comes up.

Speaker : And it's very painful.

GREGORY WARNER: An older woman in her s or s and she just holds her hands out.

Speaker : And I'm ... I clean offices and it just hurts when I ... Sometimes when it's ... try to grab something, it hurts, and I ...

STEVE BUZA: Do you have carpal tunnel problems?

Speaker : Probably.

JAD: Carpal tunnel. Explain what that is?

GREGORY WARNER: I mean as far as I know, it's an inflammation of the ligaments and it's really, really painful and it's a repetitive stress injury.

STEVE BUZA: [inaudible I want to show you something, though. Stand right here sideways. Can everybody see?

GREGORY WARNER: So what he does is he basically tells her to grip together ...

STEVE BUZA: I want you to take your little pinky.

GREGORY WARNER: ... Her pinky and her thumb.

STEVE BUZA: And your thumb, and put it right like that.

GREGORY WARNER: And make a ring, like an okay symbol.

STEVE BUZA: Now, I'm going to take my smallest finger, my pinky.

GREGORY WARNER: Then he sticks his finger in the ring.

STEVE BUZA: I want to try to see if I can pull my pinky through your hands.

GREGORY WARNER: And he says, "I'm going to try to break it, and you try to stop me."

STEVE BUZA: And I want you to fight me now. I want to see how much strength you got there. Are you ready?

GREGORY WARNER: He just pops it right open.

STEVE BUZA: You got no strength there at all, dear.

GREGORY WARNER: She can't hold her grip.

STEVE BUZA: That means she got trouble in her carpal tunnel, which is right here. Give me those hands. Give me those hands.

GREGORY WARNER: She gives him her hand and he takes it both of his.

STEVE BUZA: Carpal tunnel, I command you in Jesus' name for all swelling and inflammation to ...

GREGORY WARNER: And he starts rubbing with his thumbs.

STEVE BUZA: I command all the ligaments and tendons to go back to their normal elasticity that's supposed to be in there. I command all pain to be gone out of this carpal tunnel region. I command that healing go into this entire arm and this carpal tunnel and all strength to come back to her in Jesus' name.

GREGORY WARNER: And then ...

STEVE BUZA: Do it again.

GREGORY WARNER: He says, "Okay. Let's do the same demonstration right again." And he has her bring her pinky against her thumb, make that grip.

STEVE BUZA: Okay. Now, I'm going to take my big finger and I'm going to fight you.

GREGORY WARNER: And when he puts his finger in this time ...

STEVE BUZA: And watch what's going to happen.

GREGORY WARNER: And pulls.

STEVE BUZA: You ready?

GREGORY WARNER: He doesn't break her grip. And you can hear, he just drags her right across the stage.

JAD: So, it worked?

GREGORY WARNER: It maybe did, at least temporarily. She went back to her seat, they gave her a blanket, she was really trembling. I went over to talk to her.

Speaker : I feel really good.

GREGORY WARNER: Can you describe what the experience was like for you?

Speaker : Actually, I don't ... Didn't feel anything at first, because I was going by faith. But then when he did that thing, I don't feel the pain.

JAD: Christian belief is that Christ died for our sins.

GREGORY WARNER: The actual phrase is, which they always repeat is ...

Speaker : By the stripes of Jesus Christ, I'm healed.

Speaker : By his stripes, we were healed.

JAD: By the stripes of Jesus, you were healed.

Speaker : He healed me when he died on the cross.

JAD: What does that mean?

GREGORY WARNER: It means that you were healed, meaning he died on the cross for our sins and also for our ailments.

JAD: So, we've already been healed.

GREGORY WARNER: We've already been healed. We just have to access it and realize it by our connection and relationship to God.

JAD: Okay, so what happened to Linda afterwards?

GREGORY WARNER: The carpal tunnel came back almost immediately. And I met with her in a coffee shop.

Speaker : But this is my belief from reading the word of God. The devil, Satan, comes in, tries to talk you out of that healing. He'll say, "You didn't really get healed." Those things come into your mind. And I believe that's just Satan. So, you have to have strong faith to stand against that.

JAD: Pain is Satan's way of testing her belief?

GREGORY WARNER: I think that's what she thinks.

Speaker : I talk to Satan. I tell him, you are lying.

GREGORY WARNER: That the pain is part of the test.

Speaker : The word of God says you're a liar.

GREGORY WARNER: And if the pain is there ...

Speaker : He wants me to prosper.

GREGORY WARNER: She's not healed. She's seeing this bigger struggle, this bigger battle where pain is just one more kind of obstacle.

Speaker : Not that there aren't times that I doubt. I do. But I have to repent. I have to say, "I'm sorry, God. I doubted, because I know you've healed my so many times at so many different things. So, I know it's for real." It's not ... fake, on my part, because I know.

GREGORY WARNER: I think that's the crucial point. I mean, if we think of it as a medical encounter, it's about pain and the body. But if we think of it as a spiritual encounter, the way she sees it, it's really a battle against doubt.

JAD: Reporter Gregory Warner. Thanks to him and you, for listening. We've got to go now.

ROBERT: Yep.

JAD: Don't forget to visit our website radiolab.org for more information on anything you heard. Also, you can sign up for our podcast as WNYC.org or on iTunes. And always, we'd love to hear what you think.

ROBERT: Completely.

JAD: Radiolab@WNYC.org is the address. I'm Jad Abumrad.

ROBERT: I'm Robert Krulwich.

JAD: And we're signing off.

[NAJI ABUMRAD: Radiolab is produced by Jad Abumrad, Ellen Horne, senior producer, Lulu Miller, assistant producer, production executive Dean Cappello. Production support by Sara Pellegrini, Scott Goldberg, [inaudible Ryan [inaudible and Jacob [Weinberg . And special thanks to me, Jad's dad, Naji Abumrad.]

[FABRIZIO BENEDETTI: Hello, I am Doctor Fabrizio Benedetti, and I just wanted to say thank you to Nick [inaudible Mark Phillips, Sam [Dingman Georgia King, [inaudible . Radiolab is supported by a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.]

ANNE HARRINGTON: Hello, I'm professor Anne Harrington. I just wanted to call and say thanks. Radiolab is produced by WNYC, New York Public Radio, and distributed by NPR, National Public Radio.]

 

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