You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine
mosaicscience.com
mosaicscience.com
Years and years ago, I worked as a house painter. One of the guys on the crew was a guy who went by the name Mugsy. Mugsy had a bit of a cocaine habit. Since he was a lifelong friend of the boss, this was tolerated. In any case, Mugsy worked off and on.
The boss told me once about what would happen with Mugsy on payday. The boss would pay Mugsy at the end of the day, and then they would all get in the van for the ride home. The boss told me that cocaine is often cut with baking soda, which can act as a laxative. Mugsy would be in the van on the ride home, with a pocket full of money, just dreaming about being able to spend some of that money on cocaine. The boss reasoned that Mugsy's body must have associated money with cocaine with the laxative effect of the baking soda — because every payday, Mugsy would be farting for the entire ride home. He couldn't help himself!
Healthy volunteers practicing the learned techniques exhibited profound increases in the release of epinephrine, which in turn led to increased production of anti-inflammatory mediators and subsequent dampening of the proinflammatory cytokine response elicited by intravenous administration of bacterial endotoxin. This study could have important implications for the treatment of a variety of conditions associated with excessive or persistent inflammation, especially autoimmune diseases in which therapies that antagonize proinflammatory cytokines have shown great benefit.
Full paper: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379.abstract
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10964515 in [“Power pose” research is the latest example of scientific overreach](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10961131)
> Thanks HN for making a graduated psychology student more critical. When I was studying psychology at uni I had no help from peers in being critical with regards to psychology. It's a lot harder being critical when no one really challenges your thoughts on the subject.
> Now on to a method that does invoke "neuroendocrine and behavioral changes". The Wim Hof Method, it takes about 10 minutes to do to feel a strong effect IMO. Don't want to hijack the topic but I thought it was a fitting counter example :)
> The results are also not barely statistical significant, it's more like 5 deviations away from the norm with regards to their main RQ.
> Paper is here: http://www.pnas.org/content/111/20/7379.full
> Claims about behavioral changes are mine (and I'm just a guy on the web who takes cold showers every day), the research team focused on immune response. But as you can see in their charts about the adrenaline boost one gets, behavioral change occurs in my experience at least.
Exposing the body to these temperature extremes, which are far outside the norms most of us experience and which must induce borderline hypothermia, surely has its own physiological effect.
I don't doubt the effect can be beneficial, but that seems squarely in the camp of physical treatment as opposed to "thinking" yourself into a different bodily state.
Cold showers are pretty awesome - you'll need all of your will-power to get into one, after a minute or two of discomfort your body will adjust -- especially if you think warm thoughts. And you'll come out feeling great!
http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/10651/does-wim-hof...
I agree with you on the idea it's not classical conditioning. The WHM has 3 components: cold exposure, breathing technique and the right mindset (mindset is akin to optimism but it is more stereotypical game-shaman like, e.g. "the cold is your friend."). IMO the breathing technique produces the biggest effect, then cold exposure itself and the mindset acts like an amplification of what you learned. In my subjective experience I'd ratio the effects as 41/39/20 (breathing,exposure,mindset).
We provide EEG feedback so users can learn how to turn off/on portions of their brains in particular ways. It's actually used pretty regularly to teach people how to recognize when an epileptic seizure is about to occur. It's also used to improve symptoms PTSD, ADHD, etc.
"If these researchers got more concrete about how patients can learn to do this"
Maybe I'm misinterpreting this, are you talking about the WHM, you can learn his method (next paragraph is an affiliate + Skype offer from my side). If you're talking about the researchers of the article, it's just classical conditioning. The procedure is very well known.
About learning WHM, like I said: can learn his method. He has an online course. You can find it here http://dealguardian.net/product/831/?hop=00melo00&trackingID... I have to disclaim it is an affiliate link. I've been teaching the WHM to my friends as a birthday gift and one of them told me I should make money from it. His (paraphrased) words were: "you were in his most important experiment and trained with him for 4 days that shows that you can learn this stuff. You have credibility from that." If HNers are interested in the course let me know. I'm making 20% ($40) for each sale and I'm willing to provide 30 to 60 minutes of Skype support (depends on my schedule / study).
The reason I signed up to be an affiliate is because I believe in his method. I didn't do the online course myself, I only know some capable video/web-dev guys edited it with him. I'll also be the first to say that you should take a real course, because in my experience you can get a lot more out of it when someone is physically present. Especially in The Netherlands, there are quite a few trainers who learned his method.
When I trained with him in the experiment I passed out a couple of times, so I was happy that someone was physically present (especially the doctors from The Radboud University with oxygen tanks if things got really bad, it never did fortunately). While this may sound dangerous, remember that we needed to train as hard as we could and there were no real medical risks IMO (note: I'm not a health professional, I'm a CS and graduated psy. student).
On another note, I read half of this article and while I want to know more about it, the WHM is not like this at all. I know that no one said this but I want to make it clear, because I'm noticing some people might read into it like that. What Wim Hof does is not classical conditioning, what he basically teaches is how to produce a stress response that suppresses the immune system indirectly (and give adrenaline and make you feel like a caveman ;) ). He formulates it perhaps a bit differently though but I always listened to the doctors during the experiment when we were talking about physiology.
If you want to know more about the WHM check out my stack exchange answer about it. It's the answer I would've wanted to read before I did his experiment. http://cogsci.stackexchange.com/questions/10651/does-wim-hof...
I hope this helped.
His arms were folded in front, close to his chest. That helped tremendously to maintain core temperature, even with ice surrounding the rest of his body. In a way, it was cheating; but no one had the temerity to point that out...
I'm sorry, at this point I stopped reading. The Doctors don't know how she would have responded to the full drug, because it didn't happen! The word 'hoped' is not testable! Where was the control (Quasi-experiment)? There is just not way to tell if she would have responded better, for all we know she was 50% better than she could have been if she'd taken the full 12 doses. Or maybe 6 doses was just the right amount for her.
I do believe that the brain is a powerful tool and have read research that shows we can change things like body heat, pain and more with mind, but this story did not have anything that evaluated the impact and cannot be used as evidence of such!
This is not like testing stuff with a computer program, you can not reset the human to a known state and replicate the experiment all over again.
Following your logic, even all vaccines are a lie, how can we know that the vaccines that we take every year are doing anything?
peer reviewed double blinded placebo controlled trials, this is an anecdote.
By having a basic understanding of the scientific method and control groups.
I'm not staying I disagree with her 'hypothesis' but, people should require evidence before accepting it as fact. Maybe if she have quoted studies, instead she used well know experiments to justify the hypothesis. When the one experiments she did quote by Sergey Metalnikov even concludes...
"The difficulty for the investigator lies not so much in inducing such responses, but in employing the proper controls, both immunological and psychological, in order to demonstrate that these responses exist and to explore the underlying mechanisms." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3908/
I guess a book entitled "What I think" would not sell as well.
Yes, that's an assumption you should further clamp down later because of such extraordinary results, but it's not unreasonable to make it, especially since it would be really strange for the earlier real drug to cause all its effectiveness spikes right when the non-drug is taken, and in the same amount as later uses of the real drug.
Similar to the vomiting poster, I had/have a longtime chronic nerve pain issue in my arms and legs that this book was tremendously helpful in managing. While fixing bad posture and a variety of other things helped, this book helped me get to the point where most days I'm in no pain.
http://www.amazon.com/Healing-Back-Pain-Mind-Body-Connection...
http://www.amazon.com/The-Divided-Mind-Epidemic-Disorders/dp...
Besides challenging the mind over matter, this work also challenges the idea of what to believe and pursue when scientific evidence is relatively lacking.
Anecdotal, sure, but either the illness or the cure was in my head.
Also... Rasputin and the Romanovs - he could stop Alexei's bleeding (haemophilia) with a phone call, when physicians had had no joy - the boy took after his father and was deeply devout.
Anyway. Interesting stuff.
:)
Sounds like you decided to reinterpret a bodily cue that you'd been interpreting as nausea to mean hunger. That's awesome. Reminds me of hearing that many people misinterpret thirst for hunger, and are dehydrated because of that. Also reminds me of my grandpa, who never took pain medication, even at the dentist. He said that it didn't hurt, it just felt intensely warm.
A powerful thought is that your entire life experience is in your head --- your nerves relay signals from throughout your body, but it's up to your brain to interpret them, and you can change the interpretation. Some conditions can get better if you reinterpret their signals. Some conditions can get better if you relax because you feel in control. That's not to say you shouldn't take appropriate medical steps, too, I'm sure there are some things to check for with mystery vomiting, for example, but then you run out of things to check.
Drugs are not the 'cost' per pill. It's all in development, so this is a silly point. Cost will go up, or part of the population will get slammed.
Placebo's are over rated. As such you have to be very sceptical of this article, it screams of alternative medicine. I wouldn't base much on this article alone.
http://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-weak...
>In 1975, a psychologist in New York was studying taste aversion in a group of rats and got an utterly mystifying result.
I'd be very interesting if this was reproducible.
Placebos can work in some narrow circumstances, but they cannot fix some basic problems. Pain relief? sure. But in place of an antibiotic? Expect a lawsuit.
http://whywontgodhealamputees.com
Which makes me wonder if some of the more faith healing type of religions end up being sued when the prayer doesn't actually produce results.
I have some creationist acquaintances who need to read this!
There are so many completely uncontrolled experiments described there, and the article just jumps to the conclusion that they demonstrate an effect. Add on top that the theory makes not a fleck of sense, and you have no credibility left.
I knowingly substituted decaf and went a few days with no headache. Good decaf is hard to come by though.
Here's a psychologist who said that the body reacts by developing an _increased tolerance_ to drugs like caffeine and heroin, based on the time of day and situation in which those drugs are taken:
http://blog.sethroberts.net/2014/02/04/philip-seymour-hoffma...
Again, I don't doubt what you're saying about the effects of caffeine on you. Not at all.
I bring this up because it's an interesting counterpoint and I don't know how to resolve it. I don't know how to think about this.
The original article focuses on specific immune suppressing drugs. Maybe the body behaves differently in the face of drugs like caffeine or heroin?
Maybe the body reacts in one direction sometimes and the other at other times for some reason (?)
We know the placebo effect is quite strong (stronger than we can fully account for, in fact.)
Postulating that it is possible to engage the placebo effect voluntarily is an interesting claim, but given that the placebo effect does exist it is not, on the face of it, impossible.
I'm definitely interested in more rigorous research in this area.
When I was about 9 or 10 years old I got to a point where I was completely fed-up by all the rules I had to follow: Eat this. Don't eat this. Be careful during sports because of your asthma. There's ozone in the forest.
So I decided to ignore every single symptom until it got so strong that I'd have to go to hospital again. I also started showering cold every day and trained myself to sleep without a blanket, so I wouldn't sweat, which would irritate my skin.
I don't know when it happened, but all my problems completely disappeared over time. I'm 30 now, tests I do now and then, say my allergies and asthma are still there, but i'm more or less symptom-free.
Whenever I feel bad I consciously use the placebo-effect, for example by drinking a large glass of water and telling myself that THIS glass of water is EXACTLY what my body needed right now and will make everything better.
Note that I'm not advocating to reduce medicine: When I have a headache, I'm the first to take an aspirin. All I'm saying is that there's definitely a large cognitive component in health and feeling well, which can be trained.
"I can’t wholeheartedly recommend the book. Overall, it gives the impression that we know much more than we do. The studies described are very preliminary and far from ready for prime time; we know that preliminary studies are often overturned by larger, better-designed studies. I found some things in the book disturbing. I don’t condone her use of the term “Western medicine;” there is only one medicine. I was appalled that after a C-section she had a VBAC at home, giving birth to her second baby underwater with the assistance of a non-NHS midwife who she believed was less likely to transfer her to a hospital if something went wrong. In my opinion, that showed very poor judgment. She misrepresents the safety of home births. She even trots out the old “death by medicine” canard. She claims that statins may only benefit 1 in 50 patients (true, but misleadingly alarmist when taken out of context as statins do save lives).
"Conclusion: Marchant has interesting ideas, but a bad title"
[1] David Gorski, 11 January 2016, "Is 'harnessing the power of placebo' worthwhile to treat anything?"
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-harnessing-the-power...
[2] Harriet Hall, 26 January 2016, "Cure Is About Caring, Not Curing: Placebos, Alternative Medicine, and Patient Comfort"
https://www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/cure-is-about-caring-no...
> So far, Schedlowski has shown that after being associated with CsA, the drink reliably induces immunosuppression in healthy volunteers, creating on average 60–80 per cent of the effect of the drug.
Interesting.
What's practice for that like?
Tricking your sense of body position is the most fun and weird thing you can do.
With intense focus you can trick it so it feels like your body is in a different position than it is. But you usually still know your body's true position from other senses so it ends up feeling like you're in two positions at the same time.
It's quite trippy.
Best I can describe. The breathing tricks were most valuable as breathing and mental state are so interconnected. Comes in handy for calming down or pumping up. Also helpful in forms of meditation.
Little things like walking around or even a proper warm up can help. I do remember repeating the same songs during key phases of a workout. I still have to avoid listening to those songs as I go to sleep at night as my brain gets wide awake.
for example: http://news.wisc.edu/study-reveals-gene-expression-changes-w...
If unspecified "mindfulness" can have such fundamental physical effects, I'm having a hard time seeing how direct psychosomatic engagement is so far fetched. Truly, while the Wisconsin studies are lumping participants' psychosomatic experiences into a broad category of "mindfulness meditation", every participants experience of "mindfulness meditation" was a unique journey into the depths of their inner world, mentally, emotionally, physically and spiritually; these categories are different angles on one thing: the experience of the human animal.
Tim Ferriss has a pretty interesting interview with him, minor language barrier notwithstanding: http://fourhourworkweek.com/2015/09/07/the-iceman-wim-hof/