Hacker News Reader

Comment by jwdunne | Hacker News Reader

The brain is a complex and powerful organ. I'm not saying in all of these cases that's what it is but the brain has the power of placebo effect. If physical ailments get better because you merely believe you're being treated, there's a chance that there's a treatment out there that the brain responds to for some people for some illness that isn't apparent generally.

If it helps where nothing else does, is that wrong? I bet it doesn't feel wrong to you - you're just glad you're better - and I don't think so either.

View on HN

Something to think about:

When raising this subject, you need to be clear in what you mean by "placebo".

If you mean that physiological healing happened due to changes in emotions or beliefs, I agree: that's fundamentally how the technique works. It's no different to a sugar pill showing increased recovery rates in a pharmaceutical trial, which can be explained by a sense of optimism and reduced worry/stress due to a treatment being administered.

If you define placebo the way some determined skeptics do in these discussions, to be a false sense of wellbeing with no actual physiological healing [1], then (in my case, for argument's sake) you'd need to account for the measurable physiological improvements that have happened in my body, that didn't happen when I was undertaking other practices over 7+ years, but that I believed/hoped just as strongly would be effective.

[1] https://sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-harnessing-the-power-of-...

I wasn't saying your treatment was placebo at all, in fact. I couldn't possibly make that call.

I'm saying that the brain is powerful enough to heal itself and the body through the placebo effect. If it's that complex, then some treatments not generally accepted will work on some people some of the time above and beyond placebo.

I wasn't saying your treatment was placebo

I am!

Sorry, I'm trying not to be defensive or argumentative, just to make this important point understood: when we are talking about physiological healing brought about by changes in emotions or beliefs, we are most likely talking about the exact same mechanism as what is commonly dismissed as the placebo effect.

The point is that it shouldn't be dismissed; it should be embraced.

I don't think emotional and psychological healing can be dismissed as placebo in physiological healing.

People think there's a great divide between mind and body but if you look at common psychological problems, they very much have a physiological representation.

With anxiety, you're heart rate and blood pressure are effected. You get tension headaches. It can trigger IBS. Hormonal changes in cortisol and adrenaline are present.

Depression drains energy and lowers stress tolerance. Stress has a similar effect as anxiety. It also has very real hormonal changes too. These can have a big impact on physiological state.

Ever been angry and then got a horrible headache? That's psychological state having a very real physiological effect!

I agree with you completely.

I believe wholeheartedly that mind and body are intrinsically linked, and that you can completely heal the body (of a condition like CFS) by healing the mind. It's what I've spent the past 6 years doing.

You're just stuck on the definition of 'placebo' :)

What's the definition of placebo? Was always sure it's used as a control when testing medical treatments in which the patient doesn't know if they are receiving the treatment or not, leading to a genuine change in state from the belief they're in the experimental group, from which clinical significance is measured from as a baseline.

I'm saying that psychological healing can have physiological effects above and beyond placebo due to the very real influence psychological state has on hormones.

If you believe that it's a placebo effect, I'm not sure if it can be called a placebo effect? The whole point of a placebo is that you don't know it's a placebo otherwise it'd have stopped working long ago.

Perhaps the common thread is the belief in its efficacy.

If it were strictly a placebo effect, I would expect any sort of treatment-- anti depresents (I've been on a dozen), talking theraposts, anccupuncture, accupressure, hypnotism, etc. etc. To have worked. If it were just the fact that I was being treated that caused my mind to cure itself, why did all of the previous lengthy and cost-incuring treatments fail?

If "placebo effect" is proffered as a debunking explanation, I'm curious as to the explanation of why this particular sham treatment had the placebo effect, while other sham and real treatments failed to have any effect, real or placebo.

Actually, I'm not saying it's a placebo effect at all. I'm saying that the brain is powerful enough to produce one as an example.

My point is that if the brain has that kind of healing power, it makes sense that other treatments that are not generally accepted will have healing power above and beyond placebo.

I don't doubt these treatments helped you.

IMO it is time for people to start assuming responsibility for their own healing and the numerous psychological / brain-state-altering techniques like meditation are a perfect example.

If anything, the "placebo" sugar pills don't work by themselves; the patients feel better due to feeling calmer that their ailment is being addressed. That by itself proves that the brain has the power to cure a lot of conditions.

I personally have found ways to self-cure with deep relaxation. I have well-repressed and usually well-controlled anxiety to this day. I am usually hyper-active and if I feel a bunch of free joules of energy in my body, I usually quickly expend them; pretty bad habit but I am working on it still. Meditation helps, A LOT. It calms your mind, reduces your CPU frequency -- so to speak -- and by this mechanism, or any other (not sure which one triggers the result) your brain manages to separate the wheat from the chaff and focus on what's really important right now.

A bit off-tangent for sure. My point was that self-healing through altering the brain's state -- be it with meditation, psilocybin, or browsing your comic book collection from when you were a kid -- absolutely works. It serves as seeing the big picture periodically, roughly speaking.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com