The Placebo Effect and the Power of Belief

If you someone told you that your medicine worked because of the placebo effect, would you feel tricked? That somehow, you’d been duped and didn’t get the good stuff? That’s often the case. But what if we question that negative connotation and start looking at it as something far more positive? What if it isn’t a trick so much as a clear demonstration of how belief, attention, and energy shape our biology every day?

The placebo effect is when belief makes the change, not any active ingredient.  But it turns out that in neuroscience belief isn’t abstract, it changes neurochemical pathways: when someone truly believes they can get better, their body responds. In the language of energy healing this translates to belief setting resonance, the moment a client believes healing is possible, their system begins to reorganize towards that state. In one well-known study at the University of British Columbia, patients with Parkinson’s disease received a saline injection they believed contained their regular drug. Their tremors eased, and brain imaging showed a real increase in dopamine levels consistent with taking their usual active medication (de la Fuente-Fernández et al., Science, 2001).

When it comes to energy healing, once belief opens the door, the healer’s presence continues to add to the structure. Their steadiness, confidence, and intention act as reference points of order within the client’s field, allowing their system to recognize where harmony lives and begin to match it. Healing, in this view, is not imposed from the outside; it is invited from within. The healer offers patterns of coherence and direction, and the body’s innate intelligence takes in what it can use, reorganizing itself toward wholeness.

This truly shines with the healing techniques added. Each are chosen deliberately for the kind of information they offer to the body’s system. For example, one technique may help the nervous system find coherence; another might help an area of congestion release; another may amplify vitality where depletion has set in. Each one is a form of energetic communication, adding data that tells the body, “Here is what balance feels like.” These are organizing principles layered upon organizing principles, sensory, emotional, and vibrational inputs that remind the body how to align itself toward health.

Science reflects a similar principle. Research on physiological entrainment shows that one person’s steady rhythm can help stabilize another’s nervous system. In a 2014 study at the University of California, participants’ heart rhythms synchronized within minutes of gentle, intentional touch, accompanied by measurable increases in parasympathetic activity (McCraty & Childre, Frontiers in Psychology, 2014). This is the biological mirror of what energy healers observe: when coherence is offered, the body recognizes and begins to follow it.

  When we look at it this way, healing becomes a layered conversation. Belief is the invitation; it signals readiness and opens the system to change. Presence is the stabilizing field, the steady coherence that allows the body to feel safe enough to reorganize. And technique is the language, the precise set of inputs that tell the system how to move toward balance. Together, they form a three-dimensional map for the body’s return to health. Each layer matters, each one builds on the other, and all are rooted in the same principle: the body knows how to heal when it is reminded of its own order. Placebo is no longer a deception, or a side note to healing, but its clearest evidence.

References de la Fuente-Fernández, R., et al. (2001). “Expectation and Dopamine Release: Mechanism of the Placebo Effect in Parkinson’s Disease.” Science, 293(5532), 1164–1166. McManus, D. E. (2015). “

McCraty, R., & Childre, D. (2014). “The Importance of Heart Coherence.” Frontiers in Psychology, 5, 1090. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01090