if there is anything that is truly magick and that science cannot refute as not magick, its placebo or the placebo effect. below is a link to an article that has some amazing insights into placebo and details a doctor trying to push the envelope of our understanding of it and its limitations. a couple of excerpts and then the link follow: Placebo effects are a striking phenomenon and still not all that well understood. Entire fields like psychoneuroimmunology and psychoendocrinology have emerged to investigate the relationship between psychological and physiological processes. Neuroscientists are charting what’s going on in the brain when expectations alone reduce pain or relieve Parkinson’s symptoms. More traditionally minded health researchers acknowledge the role of placebo effects and account for them in their experiments. But Langer goes well beyond that. She thinks they’re huge — so huge that in many cases they may actually be the main factor producing the results. [...] Placebo effects have already been proven to work on the immune system. But this study could show for the first time that they work in a different way — that is, through an act of will. “As far as we know today, the placebo responses in the immune system are attributable to unconscious classical conditioning,” says the Italian neuroscientist Fabrizio Benedetti, a leading expert in placebo effects. In Benedetti’s experiments, a suggestion planted in the minds of test subjects produced physiological changes directly, the way a dinner bell might goose the salivary glands of a dog. nyti.ms/1A7eRsH
Posted on: Mon, 08 Dec 2014 03:23:22 +0000