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Comment by jazzyjackson | Hacker News Reader

Sorry what? What does ego death have to do with healing a back injury?

Nothing and everything: https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/immunology/articles/10....

(This is a serious article by a serious researcher. There exists good work on Frontiers in….)

The 5-HT2A receptor is profoundly immunomodulatory. (Acid is arguably a more potent immunomodulator – an antiinflammatory one – than it is psychoactive.) Local inflammation is a thing in injury, "global" inflammation as well – there is strong interplay between cytokines and metabolic/anabolic/catabolic process; Interleukin-6 stimulates osteoclasts which actively break down joint tissue – and neuroinflammation also affects physiology. Muscle tone, blood flow, pulmonary function, and so on.

Ego death happens to be a phenomenon or qualia when you boop that receptor hard. I'm not sure ego death necessary for anything. It might be. Ego death is very intimately related to the individual neuronal state and memory, and inflammation is quite enmeshed with that. (Cf. cortisol.)

huh. glad I asked.

I was quite surprised to find that paper! Thank you for… the audience?, for your consideration? It's quietly somewhat maddening that this is on the books and there's so little mention of it.

Like, psychedelics? I'm not a hippie. I'm not into psychedelics. I'm into neuroinflammation, haha

I did say aside from physical ailments

Chronic Back pain is correlated with emotional trauma. The physical body is a mere projection of the energetic and spiritual being. This is wahy meditative spiritual practices such as yoga and taiji are good for chronic pain, as the physical pain is a mere projection of a deeper trauma that needs released.

how does my spiritual wellness affect the mechanical structure of my lower back?

Setting the woo aside, there is a lot of data on disorders like central sensitization syndrome that show our psychological state has a very strong modulating effect on our perception of pain.

Ignoring the spiritual part, emotional state does have a well-known feedback loop with physical state. There’s a (largely incorrect) idea in pop psychology that just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness. It’s not nearly that simple, but there are some more straightforward examples: lots of tense emotional states (anger, anxiety) lead to tense muscles (jaw being the classic example). Relaxing your jaw can lead to a (temporary) relaxation of your emotional tenseness. I’ve never heard of a similar result for the lower back, but it’s not hard to imagine. If nothing else, they must be correlated through sedentary lifestyle.

> (largely incorrect) ... just as happiness leads to smiling, smiling leads to happiness.

I don't have a citation to hand and it's really old but there was academic research supporting that at some point. IIRC they used some clever request to get people to move their facial muscles in various ways without tipping them off about what was really going on and then asked them lots of questions that touch on emotional state.

Functional disorders are a thing, and placebo surgery for osteoarthritis of the knee works just as well as real surgery: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259

I have heard psychedelics be described as the most effective placebo of all placebos.

I mean tons of back pain is medically unexplained. It's not like physiology has a perfect record here that can be used to dismiss alternative theories.

Thankfully, you don't need a perfect record to dismiss theories like "a wizard did it."

There's a really neat book called Gift of the Raven about an athlete with chronic knee pain that doctors couldn't figure out any plan to stop. He rowed from Alaska to Siberia and the book goes on about a shaman that performs a healing ritual (psychedelic mushrooms were involved) and he finds himself cured. So, there are times I suppose when the pain is all in your head, and maybe has a feedback loop since pain will also cause muscle contraction which can pull bones out of alignment. Relax enough and the pain stops.

By directing your attention towards, or away from, physical phenomena that mechanically affect your lower back: overexertion, underexertion, posture, nutrient intake, crowd...

Relieved to learn that my small peen is merely a projection of my energetic spiritual being.

I feel like you missed a turn somewhere.

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