Candy Cures

The most effective treatment a doctor can prescribe isn't always a drug. In fact, the latest research shows that sugar pills, meditation and even your memories can be as powerful as any prescription. What that means for you? The secret to wellness is in your hands—or, rather, between your ears.

As corny as it sounds, Anya Padovano spends a lot of time visiting her happy place. "I envision the view at the top of a mountain in Piermont, New Hampshire," says Padovano, 24, a consultant to a fashion designer. "Or I think of drawing picture after picture as a little girl, a time when there was no such thing as a problem. And sometimes I just sit there and think of nothing." Every day for about 20 minutes, she forces herself to forget about whatever is irking her and find a bright side. Padovano, who lives in New York City, has been doing this since last year, when she realized that thinking positive meant the difference between living as a near invalid and having a healthy, happy life.

Eight years ago, Padovano was diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called idiopathic thrombocytopenic purpura, which destroys platelets, the cells responsible for blood clotting. People with ITP are particularly vulnerable to hemorrhaging after only minor injury. No one knows the cause of the condition, and the medical treatments available are hit-and-miss. Padovano endured blood tests to monitor her platelet levels several times a week along with more than six years of therapies that ultimately failed. Finally, in 2002, her doctors suggested she have her spleen removed because the organ plays a large role in illness. Surgery would be risky, though, leaving Padovano highly susceptible to infection because the spleen also helps filter out infectious organisms from the blood.

Desperate to find another option, Padovano's mother came across an online survey that piqued her interest: It found that nearly 20 percent of people with ITP who practiced positive thinking experienced a sustained increase in their platelet levels. "I never bought into this alternative medicine stuff," Padovano says. "My mom would tell me, 'Visualize platelets growing,' and I'd tell her to knock it off." But when Padovano considered her other choice, surgery, she figured positive thinking was worth a try. Besides, she was an emotional mess. "I'd get depressed when my platelets would drop really low. I was angry that I was sick so often," she says.

So in May 2003, she joined a 10-week program at the Mind/Body Medical Institute in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, designed to help people reduce various symptoms. Along with a healthy diet and exercise, Padovano learned how to meditate as well as how to halt negative thoughts. Instead of thinking, "I'm damaged," whenever her platelets dropped, she told herself, "This is how it is, so tonight I'll stay home rather than getting frazzled." Padovano will never know exactly what did the trick, but within six weeks of completing the program, her platelet count nearly tripled to 30,000 per microliter of blood; since then, it's climbed to 195,000, well within the normal range of 150,000 to 400,000. "I still can't go bungee jumping, but this count is good enough for me to sleep at night," she says.

Feeling better is believing

Even if you tend to regard anything "mind/body" as a bunch of hooey, it's increasingly impossible to deny that you can influence your ability to heal by learning the best ways to think about health. In fact, what Padovano managed to do for herself—using her mind to manipulate her physical response—is what doctors have long been doing for patients without their always knowing it: that is, using the placebo effect.

The placebo idea was born centuries ago, when doctors intuited that encouraging a patient to think more positively about the likelihood of recovery could actually improve symptoms. One way they did that was occasionally to appease (some may say trick) demanding and desperate people with "medicines" known to be inactive. Doctors soon learned that those supposedly bogus treatments weren't necessarily bogus at all. In fact, about one in three people given a placebo will experience an improvement, says Daniel Moerman, Ph.D., medical anthropologist at the University of Michigan at Dearborn. Though healers have known the placebo effect works, they didn't understand how . Now new research is helping reveal how your thoughts, feelings and beliefs can work such apparent magic—whether or not you're aware of them. "The placebo response is a window into the mind/body connection," says Jerome Groopman, M.D., author of The Anatomy of Hope (Random House).