Must we take natural remedies instead of prescription products? There is a gigantic range of thought out in the world, much of it heavily questionable. But there’s one thing we can be secure in: natural medicine are not meant to be used instead of prescription products. You are not going to get your diabetes cure from a natural remedy, so don’t expect the world.

Notice every natural product, and you will see that they are listed as ‘not medicine’ and not to be consumed as though they were. But that’s not precisely what we’re chatting about here.

Explaining How a Placebo Works

In basically every medical test run ever done, subjects are provided with a placebo, or a pill that does nothing. They are not told that the drug they are consuming is having no effect. Every time, observers notice that the placebo has a proper effect.

This result has been tested over and over again: it is one of the fundamental examples of the brain’s power over the body; the skill of the mind to fundamentally effect physical manifestations.

How You Can Use the Placebo Effect

If a proper M.D. told you to eat a banana each day, because it would help some sort of medical condition you had, you would likely do it. And quite possibly, your mind could convince your body (how this goes about is still basically!fundamentally a scientific mystery) to get to work on that problem.

In general, many natural cures work on a similar foundation. They have not been fully evaluated in laboratory environments, so knowledge about the properties inherent in each natural remedy comes from more broad studies. Claims are not made that a specific natural medicine will fix a disease or sickness, but in a general sense, many properties of these natural medicines have been known to function such an area before.

And if not, it doesn’t really matter--you are taking something, in much the same way as a placebo, that is doing something towards your problem. But the fact that there is a great big history of non-scientific, non-lab-proven knowledge behind this remedy (like, for example, that pomegranates are generally excellent for your body), has a very big effect on how your head treats that process of consuming the medicine. When you consume the remedy and think about how it functions, you are commencing a process inside your body that science itself still does not comprehend.

Why You Can’t Just Swallow a Sugar Pill

Taking a sugar pill alone isn’t going to do anything. If it did, we’d all be using that method for many issues, especially when we don’t want to throw down an actual pharmaceutical. We need something that is halfway between an actual prescription drug (and its theoretical side effects) and a sugar pill that does squat.

Natural remedies fill this gap. They are not pharmaceuticals, they are just natural extracts, from vegetables and herbs and so on. They have some medicinal qualities, but the fact that they will fix your problem has not been scientifically proven in a lab. But that doesn’t matter.

What is crucial is that you are commencing the placebo effect, which is far stronger than you might expect. If you are not always happy about taking a pharmaceutical for a milder symptom of something (anxiety, for example), why not sample a natural cure?