Comment on Is Placebo A Treatment For All Disease?
squashkin@wolfballs.com 2 years agowell yeah I guess people should keep a few things in mind: placebos won't always work, some diseases have no treatment, and our bodies simply are destined for the grave eventually (I think it's maybe a wrong attitude to think there's always a cure to disease) - but I think this is an overlooked tool that could have surprising effects for certain people in small doses I guess
as you mention psychiatry (not by name), it would be nice to me for people to take a placebo antidepressant versus harmful antidepressants in mild to moderate cases where apparently they can have not much effect.
While the whole concept of “meridians” and “energy zones” might be pseudoscience
yeah, I acknowledge that to me things like "reiki healing" and whatever may not actually be effective in themselves, but the belief in them is having an effect. I think perhaps we need to try to take that effect and then take the "pseudoscience" out of it, like by consciously taking a pill that you know is placebo and inert and telling yourself it can heal you. I'd like to see more progress made on studying how this could be done.
a weight loss pill might be another one, weight loss pills often seem useless to me, but a placebo one wouldn't hurt you anyway.
“special baseball bat,”
yeah I wonder if there is a way to humanize placebos and make them "fun", like people use "lucky" objects. From a Christian / religious standpoint, I want to avoid magic and superstition, but I think there might be a way to go about it that doesn't do that. The object doesn't have to be "lucky" but just "special", and that still could possibly boost performance.
Sometimes things thought to be inert do exert a tad more benefit than a placebo
or to the opposite case, sometimes things thought to be helpful might be more harmful than a placebo which is inert! ("vaccines", perhaps?!)
Spotted_Lady@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
Good points.
I do think energy healing can be effective in some cases if there is an actual "energy disturbance." Not every pain comes directly from Satan/Demons, for instance. I mentioned dowsing/muscle-testing elsewhere, and it is interesting that you can ask a question, get a stable answer, do a spiritual intervention, and then get a different stable result. I had a pain in an arm for a year, contacted an energy healer about something else, and she claimed there was some bad energy in my arm even though I never mentioned it. So she cleared it and the pain/cramp went away.
Of course, there can be other explanations for the arm pain example. For instance, such a pain could be poor circulation and over the year, I could have grown more blood vessels in that area. There is a mechanism for clogged arteries/veins to signal they are in trouble and cause the body to grow more in that general area. The problem with that mechanism is that it doesn't always work. I mean, whatever enzyme/hormone involved would have to find target sites. If plaques are severe, these chemical messages are being sent, but there is nothing able to receive the messages. That gives a clue as to how exercise works. Physical stress releases the low circulation signals, so you grow more vessels to deal with the increased demands on the body. However, exercise doesn't necessarily remove plaques in and of itself.
And yes, your last paragraph reminds me of the term, Iatrogenic. That is something caused by medical interventions. At one point in time, there was an epidemic of pediatric blindness. Researchers started designing strong antioxidants since they concluded the eyes were getting too much oxygen in infants. But such drugs might have not made it to the market, but I don't remember. Doctors started re-examining their practices and concluded that maybe routinely using high oxygen supplementation for all newborns was a bad idea. Yes, oxygen is good for the body, but you need the right amount.
masterofballs@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
All pain is from Satan?
Spotted_Lady@wolfballs.com 2 years ago
I meant that while there may actually be spiritual causes for symptoms, they are generally not where you look first.
If you see hoofprints in town, you generally would look for horses first, not zebras.
You can argue that all pain comes from evil, ultimately, and that is why I specified "directly." While maybe a demon could have caused you to fall, casting them out would not magically fix the broken leg. That would need a cast.