Review
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A New York Post Best Book of 2016
A New York Magazine Best Science Book of 2016
A Mindful.org Top 10 Mindful Book of 2016
A Sunday Times Book of the Year
An Economist Book of the Year
A Spirituality & Best Mind/Body Book of 2016
“Ms. Marchant writes well, which is never a guarantee in this
genre… Second, [she] has chosen very moving characters to show us
the importance of the research… and she has an equal flair for
finding inspirational figures… the studies are irresistible, and
they come in an almost infinite variety.”
—New York Times
“Cure is a cautious, scrupulous investigation of how the brain
can help heal our bodies. It is also an important look at the
flip side of this coin, which is how brains damaged by stress may
make bodies succumb to physical illness or accelerated aging…Cure
points a way toward a future in which the two camps [mainstream
medicine and alternative therapies] might work together. After
all, any medicine that makes a patient better, whether
conventional, alternative, or placebo, is simply medicine.”
—Wall Street Journal
“A well-researched page-turner… raises questions about the role
of culture, environment and neurochemistry in our responses to
—and may very well lead to widespread changes in the
ways we practice medicine.”
—Susannah Cahalan, New York Post
“Cure is for anyone interested in a readable overview of recent
findings in mind-body phenomena, a reliably enthralling topic… A
rewarding read that seeks to separate the wishful and
emotion-driven from the scientifically tested.”
—Washington Post
“Research-heavy but never dull, this revelatory work about the
mind-body connection explains how the brain can affect physical
healing.”
—Entertainment Weekly
“Marchant is a skeptical, evidence-based reporter—one with a
background in microbiology, no less—which makes for a fascinating
juxtaposition against some of the alternative s she
discusses.”
—New York Magazine
"A thought-provoking exploration of how the mind can affect the
body and can be harnessed to help treat physical illness."
—Economist
“In a wide-ranging and compelling new book, science journalist Jo
Marchant explores whether the mind can heal the body… With
lively, clear prose, Marchant surveys the evidence for the
mind-body connection.”
—Science News
“Fascinating and thought-provoking. Marchant has travelled
extensively around Europe and the US, talking to workers
and ordinary folk, to produce this meticulously researched book…
Cure is a much-needed counter to a reductionist medical culture
that ignores anything that doesn’t show up in a scan… [it] should
be compulsory reading for all young doctors.”
—New Scientist
“A revved-up, research-packed explication of the use of mind in
medicine, from meditation to guided visualisation. Marchant’s
nimble reportage on the work of scientists in novel fields such
as psychoneuroimmunology and her discussion of placebos are as
fresh as her reminders of how stress and poverty affect wellbeing
are timely."
—Nature
“Could my belief that I’m going to feel better in itself heal me?
It’s a fascinating question, and one that British author Jo
Marchant takes on with omb in her new book, Cure.”
—Spirituality &
“Writing with simplicity, clarity and style, and covering an
enormous range of material, [Marchant] surveys with grace what we
think we know, and what we would like to know, about the
mysterious and troubling relationship between our minds and our
bodies… [She] is level-headed, always with one foot ed in
the worlds of science and reason. Though open-minded, she is
rigorous, her gently skeptical tone reassures, and she gracefully
skewers quackery.”
—The Guardian
“Thought-provoking… This new generation of evidence-based
mind-body researchers has produced some remarkable findings,
which Marchant analyses with elegance and lucidity."
—Times Literary Supplement
“Jo Marchant makes her case so cogently that it is hard to
disagree [with her]… The author has a gift for writing that is
both clear and vivid, and communicates complex ideas in a way
that is comprehensible and uncondescending… This is surely an
area of medicine whose time has come.”
—The Independent
"A diligent and useful work that makes the case for 'holistic'
medicine while warning against the snake-oil salesmen who have
annexed that word for profit."
—Sunday Times
“This is an important book, and one that will challenge those
dismissive of efforts to investigate how our thoughts, emotions
and beliefs might directly influence our physical wellbeing… The
evolving science explored in Cure is intriguing and trailblazing,
and Marchant's account of its pursuit is often gripping… There's
a lot to this impressive book, and it has the potential to have
the same dramatic impact on our understanding of our self as
Norman Doidge's blockbuster, The Brain that Changes Itself.”
—Sydney Morning Herald
"Marchant explores the possibilities of psychology-based
approaches to improving physical well-being in this open-minded,
evidence-based account… A powerful and critically needed
conceptual bridge for those who are frustrated with
pseudoscientific explanations of alternative therapies but
intrigued by the mind’s potential power to both cause and treat
chronic, stress-related conditions."
—Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"A balanced, informative review of a controversial subject."
—Kirkus Reviews
"Cure represents a journey in the best sense of the word: a
vivid, compassionate, generous exploration of the role of the
human mind in both and illness. Drawing on her training as
a scientist and a science writer, Marchant meticulously
investigates both promising and improbable theories of the mind’s
ability to heal the body. The result is to illuminate a
fascinating approach to medicine, full of human detail,
integrity, and ultimately, hope.”
—Deborah Blum, author of The Poisoner’s Handbook and Love at
Goon Park
“This is popular science writing at its very
best. Cure beautifully describes the cutting-edge research going
on in the fascinating—and until now, often unexplored—area of
mind-body medicine. I would recommend this book to anybody who
has a mind and a body.”
—Henry Marsh, author of Do No Harm: Stories of Life, Death, and
Brain Surgery
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About the Author
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Jo Marchant is the author of Decoding the Heavens,
shortlisted for the Royal Society Prize. She has a PhD in
genetics and medical microbiology and has written on everything
from the future of genetic engineering to underwater archaeology
for New Scientist, Nature, The Guardian, and Smithsonian. She has
appeared on BBC Radio, CNN, and National Geographic. She lives in
London.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Chapter 2
Linda Buonanno hugs me as soon as we meet, and shows me upstairs
to her small, first-floor apartment in a housing block just off
the freeway in Methuen, Massachusetts. Her living space is tidy
but densely packed with framed photos, scented candles and an
overwhelming preference for the color green. She sits me at the
table, in front of a perfectly laid out tea set and a plate of
ten macaroons. The 67-year-old is plump with short, auburn hair
and a girlish giggle. “Everyone thinks it’s dyed, but it isn’t,”
she tells me. She hovers until I try a macaroon, then sits down
site and tells me about her struggles with irritable bowel
syndrome (IBS).
She talks fast. Her symptoms first struck two decades ago, when
her marriage of 23 years broke down. Although she dreamed of
being a hair- dresser, she was working shifts in a factory,
running machinery that made surgical blades, juggling the 60-hour
week with a court battle and caring for the two youngest of her
four children. “I went through hell,” she says. Within a year of
the split, she started suffering from intestinal pains, s,
diarrhea and bloating.
The condition has affected her ever since, especially at
stressful times such as when she was laid off from the factory.
Their jobs outsourced to Mexico, the group of women with whom she
had worked and bonded was scattered. She retrained as a medical
assistant, hoping to find work in a
chiropractor’s office, but once she qualified she found that no
one was hiring. When she did finally find a part-time job, she
had to give it up because of the pain from her IBS.
The condition has destroyed her social life too. When the
symptoms are bad, “I can’t even leave the house,” she says. “I’d
be keeling over in pain, running to the bathroom all the time.”
Even buying groceries re- quires staying within reach of a
bathroom, and she lists the local facilities: one in the Market
Basket, one in the post office down the street. “This is 20 years
I’ve been doing this,” she says. “It’s a horrible way to live.”
Now she has to juggle the condition with looking after her
elderly parents— her mother lives alone, while her her, who
suffers from dementia, is in a nursing home. Linda’s brother was
killed in Vietnam, and her twin sister died of cancer 18 years
ago, so she is the only one left to help them.
She brightens. “But I travel,” she says. “I go to England, I do
every- thing. I love it.” I’m thrown by this statement until I
realize that she’s talking about Google s. I ask her to show
me, and we move over to her computer, which sits on a desk
squeezed between the sofa and the micro- wave. She fires up the
s program and lands us on top of Buckingham Palace in London.
Suddenly I get a sense of how much time Linda has spent in this
flat. She knows the layout of the palace ly, zooming in
to try to peek through the windows, then flying around the back
to check out the private gardens. Other favorite destinations
include the Caribbean island of Aruba, and the celebrity mansions
of Rodeo Drive. Sometimes she looks up the addresses of her old
workmates from the factory, friends who when they lost their jobs
moved away to Kentucky or California, places that because of her
IBS, and the demands of her parents, she can never visit for
real.
Over the years, Linda has, like many patients with irritable
bowel syn- drome, been passed from doctor to doctor. She has been
tested for intol- erances and ies, and has tried cutting
out everything from gluten and to tomatoes. But she found no
until she took part in a trial led by Ted Kaptchuk, a
professor at Harvard Medical School in Boston. It was a trial
that would revolutionize the world of placebo research.
• • •
“You know I’m deviant?” Ted Kaptchuk looks straight at me and I
get the sense that he is rather proud of this fact.1 “Yes,” I
answer. It’s hard to read anything about the Harvard professor
without coming across his unusual past. In fact it seeps from
every corner of our surroundings—the house where he lives and
works, on a leafy side street in Cambridge, Mas- sachusetts.
I’m asked to remove my shoes as I enter, and offered a cup of
Earl Grey tea. Persian rugs cover the wooden floors, and proudly
displayed in the hall is a huge brass tea urn. The décor is
elegant, featuring period furniture, modern art and shelves
filled with books—rows of hardbound doorstops embossed with gold
Chinese lettering next to English volumes, from The Jewish
Wardrobe to Honey Hunters of Nepal. Through the win- dow I
glimpse the nuanced greens and pinks of a manicured ornamental
garden that might be more at home in Japan.
Kaptchuk himself has gold rings, big brown eyes and a sweep of
gray- ing hair topped by a black skullcap. He likes to quote from
historical man- uscripts, and his answers to my questions are
accompanied by long pauses and a furrowed brow. I ask him to tell
me his own version of the path that brought him here and he says
it started when he was a student and he traveled to Asia to study
traditional Chinese medicine.
It’s a decision he attributes to “sixties craziness. I wanted to
do some- thing anti-imperialist.” He was also interested in
Eastern religions and phi- losophies, and the thinking of the
Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong. “Now I think that was a
really bad reason to study Chinese medicine. But I didn’t wanted
to be co-opted, I didn’t want to be part of the system.”
After four years in Taiwan and China, he returned to the U.S.
with a degree in Chinese medicine and opened a small acupuncture
clinic in Cambridge. He saw patients with all sorts of
conditions, mostly chronic complaints from pain to digestive,
urinary and respiratory problems. Over the years, however, he
became more and more uncomfortable with his role as a healer. He
was good at what he did—perhaps too good. He would see dramatic
cures, sometimes before patients had even received their
. “I would have patients who left my office totally
differ- ent,” he says. “Because they sat and talked to me, and I
wrote a prescrip- tion. I was petrified that I was psychic. I
thought, Shit, this is crazy.”
Ultimately, Kaptchuk concluded that he didn’t have paranormal
pow- ers. But equally, he believed that his patients’ striking
recoveries didn’t have anything to do with the needles or the
s he was prescribing. They were because of something else,
and he was interested in finding out what that something was.
In 1998, Harvard Medical School, just down the street from
Kaptchuk’s clinic, was looking for an expert in Chinese medicine.
The U.S. National Institutes of (NIH) was opening a
center dedi- cated to funding scientific research into
alternative and complementary medicine. Although tiny compared to
existing NIH centers investigating cancer, for example, or
genetics, it promised to be a useful new source of research
dollars for Harvard. “But no one there knew a thing about Chinese
medicine or any kind of alternative medicine,” says Kaptchuk. “So
they hired me.”
Rather than study Chinese medicine directly, however, he decided
to investigate the placebo effect, to find out whether this could
explain why his patients did so well. Whereas Benedetti is
interested in the molecules and mechanics of the placebo effect,
Kaptchuk’s focus is on people. The questions he asks are
psychological and philosophical. Why should the expectation of a
cure affect us so profoundly? Can the placebo effect be split
into different components? Is our response affected by factors
such as the type of placebo we take, or the bedside manner of our
doctor?
In one of his first trials, Kaptchuk compared the effectiveness
of two different kinds of placebo—fake acupuncture and a fake
pill—in 270 pa- tients with persistent arm pain.2 It’s a study
that makes no sense from a conventional perspective. When
comparing two inert s— nothing with nothing—you wouldn’t
expect to see any difference. Yet Kaptchuk did see a difference.
Placebo acupuncture was more effective for reducing the patients’
pain, whereas the placebo pill worked better for helping them to
.
This is the problem with placebo effects—in trials they are
elusive and ephemeral, rarely disappearing completely but often
altering their shape. They change depending on the type of
placebo, and they vary in strength between people, conditions and
cultures. For example, the percentage of people who responded to
placebo in trials of a particular ulcer medication ranged from
59% in Denmark to just 7% in Brazil.3 The same placebo can have
positive, zero or negative effects depending on what we’re told
about it, and the effects can change over time. Such shifting
results have helped to create an aura around the placebo effect
as something slightly unscientific if not downright crazy.
But it isn’t crazy. What these results actually show, says
Kaptchuk, is that scientists have long gotten their understanding
of the placebo effect backwards. When he arrived at Harvard, he
says, the experts there told him that the placebo effect “was the
effect of an inert substance.” It’s a commonly used description
but one that Kaptchuk describes as “com- plete nonsense.” By
definition, he points out, an inert substance does not have any
effect.
What does have an effect, of course, is our psychological
response to those inert substances. Neither fake acupuncture nor
a fake pill is in itself capable of doing anything. But patients
interpret them in different ways, and that in turn creates
different changes in their symptoms.
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