From: "Jan Maslow" (jmaslow@jps.net)
To: scienceandspirit@sriaurobindocenter-la.com
Subject: Re: Placebo study
Date: Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:10:38 -0400

Hi Will:

Indeed, the placebo effect goes right to the heart of Richs question about good and bad science. I have two passages here about the placebo one brief one just for fun, and an extended commentary by Alan Wallace, elaborating on the challenge that the placebo presents to those in the scientic community who are members of the church of materialism.

Patrick Wall, a British psychologist and expert on pain research, wrote a beautiful essay about placebos in Max Velman's book, *The Science of Consciousness.* He reports on a study of different kinds of responses to placebos. The study concluded: Capsules containing colored beads are more effective than colored tablets, which are superior to white tablets with corners, which are better than round white tablets. Beyond this, intramuscular saline injections are superior to any tablet but inferior to intravenous injections. Tablets taken from a bottle labeled with a well-known brand name are superior to the same tablets taken from a bottle with a typed label.

Wall goes on to say his favorite story of placebos comes from a doctor who always handled placebo tablets with forceps, assuring the patient that they were too powerful to be touched by hand.

Here is the passage from Alan Wallaces book, *The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness,* page 167:

>The ideological domination of scientic materialism is particularly evident in modern medicine. According to scientic materialism, there should be no reason to expect subjectively experienced mental processes such as trust, faith, belief, and expectation to exert any inuence on the body. But practicing physicians have found no single, more powerful, or more ubiquitous element in healing all manner of diseases than the so-called placebo effect. One of the most renowned instances of this effect is recorded in the story of Mr. Wright, who was diagnosed in 1957 as having cancer so advanced that he was given only a few days to live. After learning that scientists had discovered a horse serum, Krebiozen, that appeared to be effective against cancer, and after begging his physician for this medication, he was injected with this serum. Two days later, his physician found that his tumors, which had been the size of organs, had simply vanished. Two months later, Mr. Wright read medical reports that the horse serum was a quack remedy, and he suffered an immediate relapse. His physician then injected him with a placebo, which he told his patient was a new super-rened double strength version of the drug; and for another two months, Mr. Wright remained in excellent health. Then he read a denitive report stating the Krebiozen was worthless, and he died two days later.

Studies have repeatedly shown that placebos can work like real drugs, even producing side effects such as itching, diarrhea, and nausea. They have also been found to work 55-60 percent as effectively as most active medications like aspirin and codeine for controlling pain, and a recent study by psychiatrist irving Kirsh at the University of Connecticut indicates they work about as well as modern drugs in alleviating clinical depression. Beliefs and expectations are somehow able to act like a guidance system that initiates radical and abrupt changes in both mental and physical processes, corresponding to the contents of those subjective mental states, in ways that remain unexplained within the ideological parameters of scientic materialism.

Even the name of this effect seems to be inuenced by scientic materialism, for a placebo, by denition, is a harmless, unmedicated preparation given as a medicine to patients either to humor them or trick them into believing they are taking actual medication. Thus, by denition, there can be no therapeutic effect from a placebo! This denition itself camouages the fact that it is not the placebo but the mental processes that have such a profound effect on human health. Scientic materialists, having no way to explain how epiphenomenal mental states could have such profound effects on the body, quickly counter that it is not the qualia of subjective mental processes that exert such inuence but their underlying neurophysiological processes. Using new techniques of brain imagery, scientists are now discovering a host of biological mechanisms that enable placebo effects to occur. One physicalist way of interpreting the mind/brain relationship in the placebo effect is to declare that thoughts, such as beliefs and expectations, actually turn into the physical agents of change in the cells, tissues and organs. According to this interpretation, thoughts themselves are dened as a set of neurons ring which, through complex brain wiring, can activate emotional centers, pain pathways, memories, the autonomic nervous system, and other parts of the nervous system involved in producing physical sensations. Thus, instead of providing an intelligible account of how subjectively experienced thoughts can inuence the body, scientic materialists dene the problem away by reducing them to objective physical processes, with no compelling logical or empirical justication whatsoever.

If the placebo effect could be reduced to some physical substance or mechanism, the production of that biological phenomenon would be a multi-billion dollar industry. But since this is not the case, and perhaps because it is commonly associated with religious faith and belief, far more effort is exerted to exclude the placebo effect from genuine medical research than to discover the exact nature of the therapeutic efcacy of specic states of consciousness. And relatively little scientic research has been devoted to exploring how people might enhance the power of their own consciousness to induce the placebo effect more frequently and effectively. Thus, the taboo of subjectivity is held in place even at the cost of public health; and in the process, a safe distance is maintained between medical science and all religions other than scientic materialism.

Best,

Don