The God Effect: How Suggestion and Ritual Shape Religion and Medicine through Placebo Responses

The God Effect is the first book of its kind, revealing the way in which there is a common factor which links medicine and religion - the way in which people respond to the actions of doctors, by feeling better, is identical to the way in which people feel better after praying, being counselled, or taking part in religious rituals.

Colin Brewer, a psychiatrist specialising in addictions, charts a long history of medical treatments which turned out to have no effect on the patients' conditions, but where people's morale and sense of well-being improved because they believed in the doctor and his remedies. In the same way, belief in the power of priests, shamans, rabbis, and other religious practitioners, makes people feel subjectively better though often not objectively improved.

Dr Brewer shows that even if, as is often the case, the doctor or priest does not himself believe, the treatments, therapies, rituals, and procedures of medicine and religion still exert the 'placebo effect'.

Surgery as placebo; priests who are atheists; hypnosis; placebo ECT; acupuncture; prayer; homoeopathy; psychoanalysis - Colin Brewer takes aim at a wide range of practices which - his researches show - do not work in the way their practitioners allege.

Colin Brewer is a psychiatrist and writer and has specialised in addiction treatment, after a career as lecturer and research fellow in psychiatry. His medical journalism has appeared in the broadsheets, the Spectator, New Scientist, and regular columns in General Practitioner and the British Medical Journal. Several dozen peer-reviewed research publications deal with obesity surgery, abortion, and assisted dying as well as addiction. He edited the book I'll See Myself Out, Thank You, and is the author of O, Let Me Not Get Alzheimer's, Sweer Heaven! And Can Social Work Survive?