Quote:
'......Cimetidine was one of the first anti-ulcer drugs on the market, and it is still in use today. In 1975, when it was brand new, it eradicated 80% of ulcers, on average, in various different trials. But as time passed the success rate of cimetidine - this very same drug - deteriorated to just 50%.
This deterioration seems to have occurred particularly after the introduction of ranitidine, a competing and supposedly superior drug.....
Bad Science » All bow before the might of the placebo effect, it is the coolest strangest thing in medicine |
So the idea implied here is that doctors enthusiasm over the new drug and loss of faith in the old one is unconsciously passed on to individual patients explaining how cimetidine performed worse than in past? Plausible?
Here we see (again) that decline effects sometimes occur not just in psi experiments but in other areas of science.
We tend to look upon the placebo effect as one which affects individuals with faith in a medicine but could these effects also be transfered collectively not via normal physical communication? According to Gertrude Schmeidler's 'sheep and goat' effect, belief facilitates psi, disbelief can block psi - Schmeidler (1943a, 1943b). At first this was assumed to be an individual effect, however ......
Quote:
'.... A person adversely affecting an experiment in extrasensory perception does not need to be physically present with the percipient. Schmeidler (1961a, 1961b) showed that the scores of percipients at card-guessing tended to be high or low according to whether an agent was wishing the percipient to succeed or to fail. Some experiments even suggest that unfavorable influences may not reach the level of an overt wish that a percipient would fail; much more subtle negative qualities may come into play (West and Fisk, 1953).....' - Dr Ian Stevenson
ESP Experience and Impact: Ingo Swann (SurvivalAfterDeath.org) |
What is perhaps harder to explain still is when the placebo effect increases in effectiveness at times?
Quote:
'....In 1999, Enserink(1) wrote a short but very interesting article concerning how greatly the magnitude of the placebo effect in double-blind pharmacological studies had grown in the previous 15 years. He pointed out that “when companies started testing drugs for obsessive-compulsive disorder back in the mid-1980’s, the placebo response rate was almost zero. As time went on, this response rate began to creep upward, up to a point where one could reasonably conclude that some clinical trials failed because of high placebo response rates. ....
http://www.tillerfoundation.com/Till...20Entangle.pdf |
Here the physicalist possibly might argue that faith in antidepressants had risen so much within the general public with the result the fakes one worked as well in a double blind experiment as the real medicine? Is that plausible?
Quote:
........Cultural beliefs may have a significant impact on healing. This is shown by a study that examined deaths in 28,169 adult Chinese Americans with lymphomas and 500,000 randomly selected age- and sex-matched white Americans. Chinese Americans born in an inauspicious birth year were likely to die four-six years earlier than Chinese born in other birth years or Caucasians...
Placebos: can you get something for nothing? |
If this is true, it seems unlikely to be due some astrological factor or satisfactorily explained by people believing they have been born on an unlucky day (who would believe that all their lives?) There is however the possibility that specific beliefs of others can form themselves into effects that affect us all unconsciously until the established viewpoint says 'this is impossible' , thereby making it more impossible? Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance theory suggests habits of thinking, affect us all, until those habits are changed?
Quote:
.......The compliance of patients also influences the outcome of treatment, irrespective of whether the patient received a placebo or a drug. A study of beta-blockers to prevent myocardial infarction found that patients who took more than 80 per cent of the doses had a better outcome (15 per cent mortality) than those with poor compliance (25 per cent mortality), irrespective of whether they received a beta-blocker or a placebo. "Placebo effects are shaped by factors that influence the meanings patients attribute to their illnesses and to the treatments they receive......."
Placebos: can you get something for nothing? |
This is truly bizarre, how can a person not faithfully taking a placebo be affected by the placebo when they didn't have enough faith or fear to take it regularly? Could it be that others on the same placebo felt that not taking it believed serious consequences upon their own health outcomes if missed?
Can any psi theory account for those bizarre results? Possibly Rupert Sheldrake's Morphic Resonance and some others.
Arguably parapsychology has discovered two things over the years (1) sheep, goat and experimenter effects seem to occur under double blind protocols (2) The source of psi seems to come from mental states closer to unconscious awareness than from conscious awareness (Dream Telepathy, Ganzfeld, DMILS unconscious physiological responses, etc.)
Did psi evolve to be consciously weak (in humans) because if strong our individuality and freewill is increasingly affected by the thoughts and opinions of other humans?
Are some cases of 'drug resistance' or 'drug tolerance' due to loss of belief in those? Drug resistance/tolerance certainly occurs, individual placebo effects due to expectation via physical senses is occurring but are these explanations masking other psi-like factors? Do our expectations of other people's health outcomes affect them directly and much as what they believe themselves?
The Collective Placebo Effect? Collective Belief & Disbelief? 
Paul that sounds curiously like holism and you are a physicalist? I don't know what you mean .....I think you have missed the point, I was asking how the placebo effect could have evolved....
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