Immune Conditioning: How to Get a Drug Response Without Taking the Drug

Sherbert instead of pills?  Count me in!

I learned about immune conditioning today and boy did it blow me away!  I was reading The Healing Mind that the body is physically able to have a drug response without actually getting the drug.  Immune conditioning research was motivated by patients taking drugs to suppress their immune systems, usually for when patients have an autoimmune disorders or when the patient is getting an organ transplant.  In both cases, the immune system starts attacking good tissues, so a major treatment is to mute the immune system to stop the attacks.

Researchers wanted to know if they could somehow use less of the immune-suppressing drug and still get a good result.  Turns out you can, you just need to do some Pavlov-type conditioning like Pavlov did with his drooling dogs.

All you need to do is pair taking the drug with some combination of stimulus like a taste, sound, or sight.  After consistent repetition, research shows that you can stop taking the drug and keep giving the taste, sound, or sight cue.  The body will still act as if it's getting the drug. 

This has even worked for humans when researchers paired a drug with white noise and sherbert.  Yummm. 

Caveat: the body's response without the drug is usually not as strong as with the original drug.  But even so, immune conditioning is used widely in the medical world to slow down how fast the body rejects a transplanted organ or to help decrease the drug dose needed by patients who need immune-suppressant drugs.

(This also explains the curious allergic response some people get to pictures of something they're allergic to.  The person's immune system is conditioned to have an allergic reaction when it sees the allergen, even when the allergen isn't even there.)