Just what the doctor ordered — a little cup of magical gloop!
Dr Michael Mosley, even at his most laidback, makes the Duracell Bunny look like Dylan the stoned rabbit from the Magic roundabout.
Bright-eyed and buzzing, the doc always seems like a man who has had three Shredded Wheat for breakfast. So the sight of him on caffeine tablets, in The Placebo experiment (BBc2), was frankly alarming.
he was testing the power of the mind, with the help of some green gloop invented by a Dutch scientist whose giant moustache bristled like it was wired into the mains. clearly, you don’t have to be bonkers to do these medical tests but it does help.
The gloop was just milk stained with food colouring and topped up with lavender drops, to make it taste, umm, distinctive. can’t see that catching on.
Dr Michael washed down two high- strength caffeine pills with the gloop. Within a couple of minutes, he was bouncing off the walls, jabbering to the camera as he performed reaction tests. his hands and his words were a blur, as he responded to thoughts he hadn’t even had yet.
after a week, he tried drinking the gloop without the pills. Same result: his brain was tricked into believing he’d swallowed a stimulant. This, he explained, was the placebo effect at work. either that, or the film crew were slipping amphetamines into his milk for a joke. Well, it would be tempting.
in another experiment, eight students were given nasal sprays that, they were told, contained ‘emotional anaesthetic’ to help them get over the pain of recent break-ups. Several took one sniff and felt instantly happier.
Placebo effect again, said Dr Michael. i’m not so sure. This seemed like the power of hypnotic suggestion: an authority figure, a calm voice and a soothing message. Maybe, given the current epidemic of ‘happy pills’, we should all be demanding hypnosis on the NhS.
The most convincing experiment involved 117 people with long-term back pain, and a pot of blue-andwhite capsules.
The pills contained only rice . . . but the patients didn’t know that. They thought they were testing a powerful new painkiller.
For some of the group, results were fantastic. One young mother was able to romp with her children for the first time in years. a housebound poker fanatic could suddenly join her friends at the casino. and one courageous bloke in a wheelchair found the rice capsules worked better than morphine.
That doesn’t mean the pain was all in their minds — just that we don’t fully understand what makes placebos tick. and more research is needed into the perpetual motion machine that is Michael Mosley.
To calm down, Canada: A Year In The Wild (c5) was the perfect prescription. its sumptuous wildlife photography looked glorious on a big- screen telly, and the mesmerising voice of Poirot star David Suchet floated over it all.
We watched foxes hunting for voles in the snow, bighorn sheep wrestling for mating rights, and bald-headed eagles plunging into icy water to seize trout.
The untouched wilderness, in this vast and sparsely populated country, was spectacular. canada, the honeyed tones of Mr Suchet informed us, has more lakes than the rest of the world combined, and hundreds of mountains higher than Ben Nevis.
Flying squirrels can glide 300 yards in a single leap. Beaver dams have a single entrance underwater, to keep out predators. Gradually, as he poured down these facts in a torrent of silver, my tensions drifted away. any aches were numbed, anxieties were quelled. This was a massage for the soul.