[Q] Placebo - mind over matter?

[paigetheoracle]

Where did you get this claim? I went to the journal. It was not published in June, rather July. I Checked July and I checked all issues. This person has not published an article in that journal.

 

Anatomy of an Illness by Norman Cousins, page 150 (Bibliograpical details, page 188 - editorial - Touching People 39(6): 492, June 1978).

 

Hope this helps - as it is second hand, perhaps Norman Cousins could have made an accidental mistake but see what you can come up with this more detailed information, if interested enough to do that and you seem to be.

[paigetheoracle]

Most of the material I've referenced is from Norman Cousin's 'Anatomy of an Illness', in which he details his own illness and treatment for it.

 

He indicates in his book that while he had massive support from a lot of doctors, some fought the new ideas of patient collaboration, tooth and nail. For instance a lawyer, Irwin Stone, while armed with reprints from medical journals on the subject of viral encephalitis for the treatment of his child, had the doctor tell him that he didn't need to be lectured by a layman on his job. Later (p.148), Cousin says that the problem is 'depersonalization' , being separated from hope and that is what this attitude does to us as patients, as people in any sphere of life. "Physicians who ignore the importance of the relationship with the sufferer are often those who possess a simpleminded philosophy about illness - that is, that illness is the enemy which he assaults with all the skill and technology at his command" (Dr Rynearson again on page 150).

 

In response to an article in the New England Medical Journal, letters from hundreds of doctors reflected the view that no medication was as potent as the patients state of mind. They also felt that that it was scientifically correct of him to state that as negative emotions produce negative chemical changes in the body, so positive emotions are connected to positive chemical changes. A doctor from New York, who telephoned Cousins, saying he had terminal cancer, questioned the value the use of chemotherapy and radiation to theoretically extend the patients life, when it destroyed the quality of that life by enfeebling the patient.

 

While in hospital he mentions the feelings of helplessness, lack of self-esteem and the feeling he and other patients had that perhaps their illness was a manifestation of their own inadequacy. He noted of an earlier illness that patients with TB separated into two camps - those confident that they would beat back the disease and resume a normal life and those who were resigned to their fate of a prolonged and possibly fatal disease. Those in the former group had a higher percentage of discharged as cured members than the latter, he noted. Paul Dudley White, a noted heart specialist, saw Cousins years after a routine insurance health check up, disclosed a serious ischemic condition and was told by the doctors that examined him, that he should give up all vigorous exercise and resign himself to a sedentary life. White told Cousins that if he'd listened to the doctors he probably would have died and his rebuff of their advice was the only thing that he could have done to save his life.

 

Cousins believed in continuity of care because it builds a relationship of trust between patient and carers (doctors, nurses etc) and my wife, a health professional says the same thing independently nowadays about her patients. She also says that how you treat toddlers when given injections, decides their reactions and the outcome. Parents who come in as scared if not more so than the children, convince the kids that they are going to go through hell and so they do. Those who she talks to like they are responsible adults, go through it with no bother.

 

Since I lost my job recently, I've gone back to weekly migraine attacks (including stiff neck and burst blood vessel in eye - neither of which I've had for ages) and arthritic joints, plus got a cold sore for good measure (When in good form and making progress in any of my projects, I am in rude good health). Norman Cousins as the above shows, made the same observation - why do some people get ill, yet others stay healthy under the same 'physical' conditions? Then there's executive flu, where people in upper management don't get ill except at the weekends or kids and workers in the lower echelons who get ill on Monday mornings (Friday high followed by that Monday morning feeling).

[enorbet2]

I'm afraid I am reminded of the "How many psychologists does it take to unscrew a lightbulb?" joke in which it is asserted in the punchline that it requires participation on the part of the lightbulb - it REALLY has to want to be unscrewed - when statements like "letters from hundreds of doctors reflected the view that no medication was as potent as the patients state of mind." are made, and especially by doctors. While humans, being animate objects can and usually do participate in their own health, it is also completely common to be cured despite complete denial and resignation as well as dying despite wishing and working ever so hard to live. One's emotional state does matter but I emphatically reject the idea that we create our own reality by "visualization" "affirmation" etc. and their opposites. Wishing to die ir being resigned to death won't make it so but swallowing cyanide or not treating cancer will and rather quickly.

 

You mention "executive flu" but it has been tied into adrenaline and other stress related hormones. Being a migraine sufferrer surely you are aware that triggers like Tyramine can "wait around" for 5 days and only trigger a migraine when adrenaline is depleted ie when the strss is off thus the Sunday Crasher. It does not follow that they avoded illness because they deeply wanted to and only succumbed wheh they didn't. They just ran out.

 

It is particularly disturbing to me that many doctors apparently pawn off the power of their trade and place the responsibility on the patient. Recently this appears to be a sad and frightening trend where doctors and pseudo doctors resort to non-prescription regimens or dropping patients altogether ("it's all in their heads") so as to minimize their risk of malpractice. This trend may be part of why the WHO has "awarded" the USA 37th place (just ahead of Slovenia) among industrialised countries. I will concede that attitude is important but it I must be convinced by some scientific data to ever accept that attitude is even 10% of the bigger picture where health is concerned. DNA, diet, exercise, and proper care are far FAR more important, IMHO.

 

Don't get me wrong, doctor's "professional distance" is way overdone too but I will take one of those over one that sympathetically blames my attiitude, my supposed lack of "desire to be unscrewed" any day. If you like, you take the placebos, I prefer real medicine.

[stereologist]

Anatomy of an Illness by Norman Cousins, page 150 (Bibliograpical details, page 188 - editorial - Touching People 39(6): 492, June 1978).

 

Hope this helps - as it is second hand, perhaps Norman Cousins could have made an accidental mistake but see what you can come up with this more detailed information, if interested enough to do that and you seem to be.

 

I cannot locate this doctor. He never published in the journal. The journal does not publish in the indicated month. It is possible that the name is misspelled, but that starts to assume a number of mistakes: name and date. Where do we stop? maybe its the wrong journal as well?

 

It appears that this is a fabrication that appeared in the book.

[paigetheoracle]

I cannot locate this doctor. He never published in the journal. The journal does not publish in the indicated month. It is possible that the name is misspelled, but that starts to assume a number of mistakes: name and date. Where do we stop? maybe its the wrong journal as well?

 

It appears that this is a fabrication that appeared in the book.

 

It's possible - did you check out the others to see if there were anymore?

 

Stereo, I meant to ask, are you a doctor? I'm not but Michaelangelika is. From this point of view we might create conjecture about the topic from our own individual perspective but only he has first hand experience with patients en mass, which means statistically he's better able to judge the subject from the population as a whole than us.

[paigetheoracle]

I'm afraid I am reminded of the "How many psychologists does it take to unscrew a lightbulb?" joke in which it is asserted in the punchline that it requires participation on the part of the lightbulb - it REALLY has to want to be unscrewed - when statements like "letters from hundreds of doctors reflected the view that no medication was as potent as the patients state of mind." are made, and especially by doctors. While humans, being animate objects can and usually do participate in their own health, it is also completely common to be cured despite complete denial and resignation as well as dying despite wishing and working ever so hard to live. One's emotional state does matter but I emphatically reject the idea that we create our own reality by "visualization" "affirmation" etc. and their opposites. Wishing to die ir being resigned to death won't make it so but swallowing cyanide or not treating cancer will and rather quickly.

 

If it was psychiatrists the joke would be how many do you need to really screw a light bulb up? As for working ever so hard to live - see perfectionism quote below (James Thurber 'Leave your mind alone')and also the case of the comedian, Doug Healy, whose brain tumour disappeared overnight because as you so rightly point out, he'd given up fighting the disease and resigned himself to death (British Daily Mail, Monday February 25th, 2008, page 13). Attitude again. It's like struggling in quicksand as opposed to relaxing and floating to the surface.

 

You mention "executive flu" but it has been tied into adrenaline and other stress related hormones. Being a migraine sufferrer surely you are aware that triggers like Tyramine can "wait around" for 5 days and only trigger a migraine when adrenaline is depleted ie when the strss is off thus the Sunday Crasher. It does not follow that they avoded illness because they deeply wanted to and only succumbed wheh they didn't. They just ran out.

 

I'm well aware of this and don't see that this really goes against what I was saying. I just said it happened because of a mental decision to accept the disease at the weekend when relaxed whereas you're saying it occurred naturally as a course from being at home and relaxed - just you're saying it's unconscious and I was saying it was conscious: I wonder if there is any way to prove it either way and whether the conscious decision idea is a delusion as opposed to an unconscious one?

 

It is particularly disturbing to me that many doctors apparently pawn off the power of their trade and place the responsibility on the patient. Recently this appears to be a sad and frightening trend where doctors and pseudo doctors resort to non-prescription regimens or dropping patients altogether ("it's all in their heads") so as to minimize their risk of malpractice. This trend may be part of why the WHO has "awarded" the USA 37th place (just ahead of Slovenia) among industrialised countries. I will concede that attitude is important but it I must be convinced by some scientific data to ever accept that attitude is even 10% of the bigger picture where health is concerned. DNA, diet, exercise, and proper care are far FAR more important, IMHO.

 

[if you read the book and one of my quotes from it, you'd note the word 'collaboration' or doctor working with the patient, to overcome their illness. Doctors dumping everything on their patients or trying to avoid malpractice suits, is not what I'm on about as this breakdown in social relationships, reflects the breakdown in the patients body or mind too. Wholeness (health) means connection - whether to society and the external world or internally in relation to the self. A healthy society is no different from a healthy body or mind, they have to work together through trust, not fall apart through distrust. ][/i]

 

Don't get me wrong, doctor's "professional distance" is way overdone too but I will take one of those over one that sympathetically blames my attiitude, my supposed lack of "desire to be unscrewed" any day. If you like, you take the placebos, I prefer real medicine.

 

A doctor needs distance to analyse the mechanics of what has gone wrong but needs the hands on attitude of a garage mechanic to sort out the problem he discovers. A pile of garbage left in the hall is still going to be sitting there unless it is consciously moved (This is the passive versus active argument and even you seem to have touched on that yourself). I take full responsibility for starting my migraines through a temper tantrum, unlike Dave Crosby in a program on CSNY. In it he felt it was unfair that when he reformed and gave up alcohol and drugs, his liver packed up. This ignores the fact that we all suffer the consequences of our actions or failures to act and this 'bolt out of the blue' in his case was no such thing but the result of self-abuse (We'd all like to have our cake and eat it but that isn't possible). I lost my job but could have saved it through A) not sending the jokes that upset a staff member who was ill or B)censored them better, so that he didn't find anything to get upset about in the first place: We all make mistakes and adults accept the consequences of their actions (The Gary Gilmour effect) - children don't, tending to blame poor old God, society, their parents ('My mother made me a homosexual' 'If I gave her the wool, would she knit me one too?'), friends, wife, kids etc. i.e. blame, deny, argue with the unfairness of their fate (I didn't do it/ I don't deserve this!). Adults see things more in Yin/Yang terms or no effect without cause - no totally innocent party. They don't dump on others but accept their own part in their own fate.

 

I'm not about what happens to us physically but the attitude we take to the situation we find ourselves in (Kipling's 'If'). In an earthquake or other disaster, we are forced upon ourselves as individuals and have to react on our own instincts because there isn't time to think about what to do for others, especially if they resist your help, no matter if you're a soldier or civilian - only after can co-ordinated social rescue begin, when things have subsided enough to do this.

 

Look at the centenarians mentioned in the introduction to the book. Most came from the country and only complained of world weariness towards the end of their lives but otherwise were quite content and healthy, only one man being a city dweller (Parisian) and he too enjoyed his life. Their attitude reminds me of 'Galaxy Quest' and the motto of the Jim Kirk spoof 'Never give up, never surrender!' as opposed to the state of the clinically depressed who have done just that. My wife who is a health professional has seen it in her job, moving from different areas of society, depending upon where she was based at the time: Those in deprived areas were only interested in easy solutions to there problems and weren't the least worried about healthy living in the main, whereas those in more affluent areas were.

 

Prejudice is a full stop on thought as emotion is on action - instantly with fear and anger, chronically through apathy, sadness and depression. Prejudice doesn't want to know because it thinks it knows already as openness is willingness to explore differences, seeking out the truth/ common ground. To quote Patrick McGoohan's 'The Prisoner' - 'Questions are a burden to others - answers a prison for oneself'.

 

I do not attack negative emotions and attitudes so much as try to understand them because perfectionism (living a lie) creates tension and this in turn leads to dis-ease as I've discovered through my own illness (Ego got in the way, turning to anger, tension and twenty years of migraine - the mild attitude I'd had to life before then, had kept me pretty healthy, through its live and let live attitude).

[stereologist]

Stereo, I meant to ask, are you a doctor? I'm not but Michaelangelika is. From this point of view we might create conjecture about the topic from our own individual perspective but only he has first hand experience with patients en mass, which means statistically he's better able to judge the subject from the population as a whole than us.

 

I'm not a doctor. I do math related to biological research. A doctor may know where to find data or has conducted their own research. I wanted to look over the papers to see how the work was done, how many subjects were used, etc. The answer is often in the numbers.

[Michaelangelica]

http://mpegmedia.abc.net.au/rn/podcast/2009/01/aim_20090110.mp3

 

All In The Mind 10 January 2009 - Your irrational mind

Summary: Like it or not, you're <em

All In The Mind - 10 January 2009 - Your irrational mind - 42k - [ html ] - 10 Jan 2009

10 January 2009

Your irrational mind

 

DOWNLOAD AUDIO

 

Like it or not, you're not the beast of reason you think you are. Dan Ariely, a behavioural economist at MIT, argues that we're surprisingly and predictably irrational. Sex, freebies, expectations, placebos, price -- they all cloud our better judgment in rather sobering ways. Dan's unique research was partly inspired by a catastrophic accident which caused third degree burns to 70% of his body. He joins Natasha Mitchell in conversation.

 

Original broadcast: 29/3/2008

 

SHOW TRANSCRIPT

[paigetheoracle]

Funnily enough there was a review of a book on this subject in Fortean Times recently, covering mass movements like fads, fashion and other simple Simon says trends, which I feel like starting a movement to ban :lol: