Positive expectations tend to enhance healing.

Surprise! Three new studies confirm that positive expectations tend to enhance healing. So much so, in fact, that you can expect to recover as much as 3 times faster if you have positive recovery expectations.

On the other hand, if you have low expectations of recover, you can expect to heal as slowly as 4 times slower. That’s a difference of 7 times – which means you can expect to heal as fast as seven times faster if you have positive expectations versus if you have negative expectations for recovery. That is significant!

What are we talking about? We’re talking about one of my favorite subjects – the placebo (and its evil twin, the nocebo) effect – which states, in a nutshell, that you tend to get what you expect to get. Here are some interesting stats from the studies:

Linda Carroll, in the Canadian School of Public Health, looked at records of over 6,000 adults with traffic-related whiplash injuries. She found that those that had positive outlooks towards their recovery actually recovered over three times faster than those who did not.

Dejan Ozegovic, also in the School of Public Health, looked at predictions around returning to work, using the same records. Positive return-to-work assumptions meant people rated themselves as “recovered” 42 per cent faster than those who had more negative expectations.

Lena Holm, a Swedish researcher who is working at the University of Alberta, found that those study participants in Sweden who had low expectations of complete recovery were four times more likely to still feel symptoms of the injury six months later.

The researchers were surprised by the findings, which showed that the severity of the injury did not have an impact on the recovery times.