What Does The Placebo Effect Say About The Mind-body Dilemma? :: Biology Essays Research Papers

What Does The Placebo Effect Say About The Mind-body Dilemma? When I was seven years old my family and I took my grandmother on a trip around northern India. It was her desire to make pilgrimages to the temples that were considered to be the holiest by the Swaminaryans, an orthodox sect of Hindus. At that time in my life, I couldn't even pretend to be interested in the activities occurring within the temples. Instead, I was mesmerized by my proximity to the wildlife that was lounging just outside of the actual walls of temples. In a two-week span of time I must have seen more than twenty temples, and by the end they all blurred together except for one. Although the temple itself was not magnificent, what was occurring inside has remained with me to this day. A male priest, who was sitting at the main alter, was pulling on elderly woman's hair causing her to scream hysterically. I discovered that the woman was suffering from a headache and was having it cured by the priest. More accurately, she was having the "ghosts" removed from her brain. For the individuals who were directly involved in the ceremony and for many of the people with whom I was traveling, exorcism was a perfectly legitimate way of curing an illness of the body. The cure had no pharmaceutical basis, but it was based in the people's belief system. The belief system for the circumstance that I witnessed was a ritualistic aspect of Hinduism. In the case of the exorcism, the individuals involved expected that the treatment would work, and as a result the treatment did work. The idea that people benefit from expectation alone is called the placebo effect, and it is not u nique to India or to the east. Placebos are medications or treatments that are benign and have no pharmacological properties 1)The Placebo Effect Real of Imagined. The category of placebo includes everything from the hair pulling I witnessed in India to the starch pills that millions of American women take along with their birth control. Until recently, placebos were considered important to Western medicine, in so far as they were part of a rigorous scientific method of testing and approving new medicine. In particular, a standard part of clinical trials is the division of patients into two categories. One category is given the medication being tested and the other is given placebo pills.