The Placebo Effect
I consider the term “Placebo Effect” to be a very underhanded insult by an arrogant culture, not to mention completely missing the profundity of what is actually happening.
If you analyze the process, what you are seeing is the body/mind/spirit’s ability to use a physical object as a focus point for accomplishing a particular effect or process on the physical state of the body or sometimes even on the consciousness of the mind where there is no a priori physical cause. A sugar pill can work as an anti-depressant, a sleep aid, a hallucinogen, a histamine blocker, or just about anything. It has no drastic chemical/herbal properties of its own, but acts as a focus point and achieves the same results that would be expected by a very specific chemical or herbal compound. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve used water as a sleep aid. I couldn’t sleep, I got a glass of water, thought very clearly to myself “due to the ‘Placebo Effect,’ this water is going to help me get to sleep.” Which is exactly what happened every time. This is nothing short of amazing in my book. And what does Western Medicine do with it? Instead of recognizing that the body usually has the means to correct it’s own disharmonies given the proper nudging, Western medicine and Western science instead call it the “Placebo Effect” and consider it to be the hateful and aggravating thing that continually screws up their precious scientific tests and has to be accounted for in statistical form in order to make said test “reliable.”
Does anyone else find it absolutely ridiculous that the more important fact mentioned above is being ignored in favor of proving/disproving efficacy of the latest pharmaceutical compund?
Let’s face it, there’s no money in cures. Biomedicine is primarily interested in numbers. Amounts, costs, profits, losses, cases with or without side effects, potential for losses via lawsuit, costs that have to be recouped for testing, patenting, marketing, and production. Numbers. Dollars.
My profession is much more interested in “What is happening? Why? How do we fix it?”
You tell me whose hands you’d rather place your life in.
Filed under: Western Medicine
In that case science is less about numbers, but about reliability and reproducability, which is a problem with placebo effect. Maybe it can only be explored individually. Interesting topic.
I would sooner place my life in the hands of a doctor than a martial arts instructor, if that is the question.
“Placebo effect” is an adequate explanation when conducting most drug trials, or medical experiments of limited scope. Not perfect, but adequate.
It is unreasonable to compare the methods of a drug trial with those of an individual patient diagnosis.
No not a martial arts instructor. That would be ridiculous. I’m talking about a Doctor of Oriental Medicine.
[...] (I discovered I’m starting to repeat myself already,so if you want to read my complaints about the placebo effect go here: http://lifegivingsword.wordpress.com/2006/11/19/the-placebo-effect/ otherwise I’ll spare you) [...]