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Originally Posted by David Bailey  Even so, I find discussions about the mechanism of effects like this extremely slippery. For example, it could be that the brain responds to acupuncture with a placebo effect that creates an opiate that then gets blocked if you add the opiate blocker! Hypnotism seems a little different anyway, because it creates an altered state of consciousness. This is analogous to discussions about the mechanism involved in various Ψ experiments - are you looking at ESP or precognition of a future time when the subject gets to know his results, etc.
David |
A reasonable question. However, the ineffectiveness of opiate antagonists to combat placebo induced pain relief is a very well established result, quite outside the study of complementary medicine. For example, opioids + opioid antagonist = placebo in effectiveness in pain relief. Furthermore, the same "acupuncture works, acupuncture + opioid antagonist doesn't" pattern occurs in animal studies. We would need to hypothesize that there is not one but multiple different placebo effects, triggered distinctly and independently by different kinds of manipulations, also distinguishing real from sham manipulations and with the same effects in animals.
Ultimately you could argue that we cannot know that any medical procedure -- even bone setting and organ transplants -- don't operate a placebo effect, but by that time the concept has gotten stretched so far it is completely meaningless.