The Placebo Effect: Scott Hinkley

I have a hard time understanding the distinctions made by modern science and medicine regarding the classification of mental and physical ailments. It seems to me that it all comes down to a much more metaphysical question of what part of you is represented by the physiology of your nervous-system, and which part derived from a manifestation of those nerves' electrical impulses (what many might call a person's soul or personality).

When a cell in your body malfunctions at a reproductive level and begins to divide rapidly, we call it a tumor. There are many homeopathic attitudes about cancers that suggest spiritual or other reasons for those malfunctions and their subsequent treatments, but for the most part, people seem to accept that cancer is primarily a physical condition. In contrast, many neurological conditions that can be traced to similar malfunctions, but in this case a corruption of neurotransmitters rather than DNA damage, are designated to be mental, rather than physiological, conditions.

I feel that the lack of agreement among scientists, let alone the general population, makes it virtually impossible to decide, philosophically and medically, if non-traditional treatments are effective. Our nervous-system, and consequently our "thoughts" are responsible for managing an innumerable list of body-functions and regulations. It seems likely to me that shifts in the neurons that are coordinating the functions of your cells would have almost as direct an impact on those cells as would specific drug-interactions with the cells themselves. Perhaps, and I offer no medical evidence, but merely postulate, shifting the behavior of neurons in a person's brain creates side- and chain-reactions which impact the overall control of the "sick" cells in a person's body. Or perhaps it is the opposite, and a feedback loop from those "sick" cells cause neural pathways to shift so much that the brain cannot successful govern the body as well. Either way, a mantra or visualization could be more of a "medical" treatment than it is currently credited as being. Perhaps the placebo effect should be considered a form of medical treatment that involves minimal outside chemical interactions. Or maybe we are just fooling ourselves.

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