Can you heal a patient with just your words?

Patients given a few encouraging words from a physician felt better faster than patients who received no reassurance, according to a recent study in the Journal of General Internal Medicine.

“For many conditions, the simple act of being reassured by a medical professional can aid in the healing process, and we needn’t always rely on medication and procedures to make us feel better,” said the study’s leader Alia J. Crum, PhD, assistant professor, Department of Psychology, Stanford University, Stanford, CA.

“Physician assurance is a component of medical care that is surely familiar to physicians, yet is under-researched and often underappreciated,” wrote Dr. Crum and coauthors.

An encouraging word

For this study, Dr. Crum and colleagues recruited 76 participants who were each given a skin prick of histamine (10 mg/mL) in the forearm. After 3 minutes, a physician visually examined each participant’s reaction, and gave about half of participants this assurance: “From this point forward your allergic reaction will start to diminish, and your rash and irritation will go away.” But the physician made no remark about the reaction to the remaining participants (the control group).

Before the physician’s visual examination, the itchy reaction had increased similarly in both groups. But after meeting with the physician, reported itchiness declined significantly faster in the group given the one-sentence assurance.

“Importantly, this effect was achieved without offering medication or other treatment,” wrote Dr. Crum and coauthors, indicating that the placebo effect works not only with pills but also with words. “These results provide empirical support for the clinical utility of assurance alone and suggest that reassuring patients who consult for minor complaints may not only equip patients with helpful information—it may assist in alleviating patients’ symptoms.”

The researchers added that the results of this study were probably conservative because participants were healthy volunteers whose allergic reactions—which were expected to decline over time even without intervention—weren’t highly stressful or concerning.

Treatment with words alone

Patient visits that don’t result in drug prescriptions or other treatment may seem costly or unnecessary from a health economics perspective, the researchers acknowledged. Nevertheless, they added, this study highlights the critical, yet rarely quantified, healing effect of visits when the physician’s only role is to assure patients they will soon feel better.

“My hope is that findings like this one inspire additional research on the physiological mechanisms of assurance, as well as promote training and compensation for physicians to more effectively leverage psychological forces in their practice,” Dr. Crum said.

This research was supported by grants from the US National Institutes of Health/National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health, and the Joan Butler Ford Stanford Graduate Fellowship.