Accepting The Placebo Effect
It seems to me that if we are ever going to find out the truth about anything, we first need to find out about how we work. The placebo effect seems like a good place to start. Wherever a group of people form a community there will be certain functions or roles naturally allotted to certain people, for example if someone gets sick, not everybody is going to want to look after them but some people will be quite ready to offer a sick person some kind of comfort.
When a person is suffering from an illness and he receives some attention from another person, he will feel better. The burden is willing shared by someone. The sick person feels that the other person is always there for them and the wight of their illness is made lighter. This principle is said to be the origin of healing in societies all around the world.
In Western culture we have invented ways of enhancing the sense of sight so that medical researchers can see the cause to disease and work to find cures by combatting micro-organisms with other micro-organisms together with natural and manufactured substances that can be seen to kill the creatures that make us sick.
So treatment of disease with drugs and vaccines has evolved. But along with the revelation of how these cures work scientists have discovered that cures, or at least remissions can come about by simply TELLING patients that they have been given medicines. It appears that we could get better just by believing that we will.
Of course this simplistic model of the placebo effect doesn’t always work, and there are many variables that play a part in the process of healing without the use of drugs or vaccines. Modern techniques for observing the workings of the brain are, some researchers say, indicating that what a patient believes can affect the body in a direct way. So maybe we not only have our psychological feelings of well-being lifted by a placebo but our physiology can be changed too!
Here is a very interesting video on the placebo effect -
The thing that interests me in this is the extent to which we are influenced by what we are told. We almost never investigate deeply to prove our beliefs, in fact we can become emotionally attached to opinions that do not stand up to scrutiny. That’s a fact, but in spite of that, we all think we are pretty smart cookies.