skepticism

[gusl]

I am a Randian, in the sense of James Randi. I wish he would open a placebo healing school.

I would like to see a community of skeptics who are into all kinds of mind&body work: meditation, NLP, visualizations, and even outright placebo pills (possibly involving intentional self-deception). What I want is a reliable way of judging what an "alternative therapy" is good for.

I think that people who give "alternative healings" / "spiritual work" provide real value in some cases, but that they would benefit a lot from some healthy self-skepticism. For one thing, they wouldn't alienate scientifically-minded people as much, and open the doors to collaboration.

Btw, it's hard to call my position "scientific" or "skeptic", because all these words have unintended connotations. So "JamesRandian" seems like a better choice.

Here's a reference:

* Adv Mind Body Med. 2000 Winter;16(1):33-46.
Placebo and health--II. How to produce not only powerful but, more importantly, reliable placebo healing and analgesia.

Here's a link for me to check later: http://mypage.uniserve.com/~jcmooney/more.htm

Comments

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Yes, calling something a "placebo effect" implies that the effect is in some sense "not real". But it is real, indeed everybody knows that this effect exists. It just shows that the mind and the body interact in some really interesting ways. I suspect that the real reason why science likes to write off the placebo effect is that it is a very difficult thing to try to study because it involves trying to assess the state of someone's mind.

[jbouwens.livejournal.com]

Placebo effects are not written off or ignored by the scientific community. They are actively researched, and are apparently "real", but no satisfactory explanation has been found so far.

Check this out:

Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.

Interesting, no?

[jcreed.livejournal.com]

(a) Calling yourself a "Randian" may make people think you mean Ayn Rand :) I guess you have to go with the Java-esque "JamesRandian" as you suggested, or else maybe "Randiian"...

(b) Assessing the placebo effect even if you the recipient of it know it's just a sugar pill would be interesting.

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

(a) I wanted to provoke my AynRandian readers.

(b)
Will it work?
It will work only if I think it works.
Do I think it will work?
Only if I think it works.

Can I muster enough self-deception to get out of the circularity?

I once read an interesting theory about the placebo effect on Edge.org, but it was not this page: Martin Seligman on Edge.org (which is also very link-worthy)

I think it was Nicholas Humphrey.

[selfishgene.livejournal.com]

Assume part of the benefit derives from patients believing in the treatment. If they find out the practitioner is skeptical the treatment will cease to work. The practitioner probably finds it easier to display belief if they really do believe.
Scientists should assess treatments empirically. Failure to understand the method of operation is not good reason to dismiss an effective treatment. Of course, the efficacy of these treatments is often only anecdotal.

[combinator.livejournal.com]

This NLP resource might be worth checking out, along with the rest of Lee Lady's universe. (Mr. Lady is a recently retired University of Hawaii mathematics professor.)