The spiritual/emotional channels we have open to the spiritual/social network depend on conditioned learning, not willful belief. If your life is a mess just figure out what emotional channels are causing that. Changing open channels requires first understanding them (know thyself) and then emotional reconditioning (spiritual practice)
The above image was made to support a Canadian Broadcasting Company weekly show called The Nature of Things which was also broadcast in the U.S on National Public Radio. The placebo effect is part of the human stress response system and works based upon emotionally conditioned expectations (perceptual biases). The perceptual biases from our social/spiritual network should also exhibit the placebo effect but no studies of that have yet been done. The placebo effect is also known as confirmation bias.
(July 6, 2022) Amazingly, placebo pills will even work if a doctor tells a patient to take pills which are labeled “placebo” and told they “are like sugar pills.” This is clear evidence that deep emotional conditioning is at work and not the strength of a belief. We modern humans are conditioned to view pills as effective. In one three week study of 80 people (70% of them women) having irritable bowel symptoms, 59% reported adequate symptom relief after taking these sort of placebo pills compared to 35% who did not take any pills yet who experienced the same caring environment. (Kaptchuk and all 2010b). This result is slightly better than the tests with the approved medicine Alosetron! The authors of this study suspect the reason for this lies in the supportive healer – patient relationship which this experiment deliberately provided.
Recent studies suggest that the placebo effect is most effective for patient complaints subject to stress effects (Miller & all 2009). This is confirmed by another recent study showing that the healer’s interaction with the patient seems to be the most important factor in the placebo response for smoking, dementia, depression, obesity, hypertension, insomnia and anxiety. Resistant to healer interaction strategies but still affected by placebos were patient reported pain and nausea (Hróbjartsson, & Gotzsche 2010).
The body’s stress response is turning out to be pervasively involved with all sorts of control loops involving the brain including those which involve the immune system. Upon the initial experience of stress, the brain will cause the adrenal glands to secrete glucocorticoid chemicals which enhance the immune system so it can better counter potential injuries. But, if the stress continues for an hour or more the effectiveness of the immune system begins to decline back towards normal. If the stress continues for a day or longer then the effectiveness of the immune system declines to 40% to 70% of normal. This makes the body more susceptible to infections and cancers. The immune system needs to decline in effectiveness in order to prevent its long term activation from attacking a person’s own body tissues and causing autoimmune diseases (Sapolsky 2004, page 154). Still long term stress increases the odds of autoimmune diseases.
Because some types of cancers are more sensitive than others on the state of the immune system, reports do exist of placebos suppressing cancers. The classic case is a 1957 report by psychologist Bruno Klopfer in which injections of sterile water were used to reduce otherwise untreatable lymph cancer under the pretense that it was a new experimental drug then in the news. This shrunk the tumors significantly until the patient read in the news that this drug was ineffective at which time the tumors grew again and the patient died (Brody 2000, page 2).
Placebo effects are not limited to humans but work for any creature with some level of consciousness, even a mouse. This was demonstrated in 1982 in a strain of mice which have an autoimmune disease similar to lupus. In this experiment, the first group of mice were given the standard medical treatment drug, cyclophosphamide at an under dosed weekly rate which lead to early death. The second group received the artificial sweetener, saccharin, weekly as a placebo unpaired with the medicine. The third group of mice received their doses of medicine only every other week in a deliberate further under dosing but this group had its medicine paired with saccharin which formed a conditioned pairing. Yet the saccharin was given in the week when the medicine was not given. This last group survived longer than the first weekly medicated group and both survived longer than the saccharine only control group (reported in Ader 1997). Why placebo group did better than the fully medicated group is unknown but perhaps the medicine had some unknown bad side effects on these mice.
In a similar experiment a few years later the placebo, even when used alone after the conditioning was learned, still had an effect until the conditioning wore off from repeated use without reinforcement. Mice conditioned by a medicine and saccharin pairing for 2.5 months were divided into three groups. One group continued to receive the pairing, another got the placebo paired with a saline injection, and the last group received nothing. The first two groups had equal survivability rates even though the second group was no longer getting the medicine. The third group died early.
This sort placebo conditioning has been demonstrated in humans and it occurs when placebo pills are taken after effective medical pills like aspirin. The placebo pills become just as effective as the aspirin for a period of time. Initially aspirin is more effective than a sugar pill but after a successful conditioned pairing the placebo pills became just as effective as the aspirin. It has also been used in a few individual human cases to avoid the toxic effects of certain medicines. All of those had successful results (reported in Ader 1997).
(July 6, 2022) Placebos which cause negative responses are called nocebos. One example due to emotional conditioning is the aggravation of asthma. In one experiment 47.5% of asthmatics had their condition worsened when told they were inhaling irritants when in fact they were only exposed to a nebulized saline solution. These same asthmatics were cured when told the same saline solutions were medicine (Hahn (1997).
Another example is that people will feel drunk and exhibit the effects of being drunk when they think they are drinking alcohol when they really are not. In this experiment, a group of college students were fooled into thinking they were drinking. They had nearly the same poor reaction as real drunks on the classic drunk test like walking a line, memory testing, and trying to catch a ruler dropped though their fingers. At the end of the experiment when they were told of the trick they sobered up immediately after laughing about it (Wiseman 2009, p 202).
Can nocebos cause death? Apparently so. Walter Cannon, a Harvard Medical School professor, wrote a compelling analysis in 1942. He started out his paper with:
He concluded with:
There is like testimony from Africa. Leonard (1906) has written an account of the Lower Niger and its tribes in which he declares:
Then consider an early AIDS patient who knew his mother was praying for his death because of the shame it brought upon her due to her conservative Christian religion. Cohen reports that the mother who:
The nocebo effect shows like nothing else the importance of grounding spiritual practice in nature instead of in human created religious delusions with their arbitrary laws and theologies. No one is powerless against spiritual powers or lordly deities. No one needs to be a victim. Spiritual powers, like Nature powers, can be understood and used either to expand the Divine space via connection, balance, and growth or to oppose it.
