By
Anthony Tyler
Guest writer for
Wake Up World
Last year, a study was released by Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. It was but one of the many efforts conducted in a partnership between BIDMC and Harvard Medical School, through their “
Program in Placebo Studies & Therapeutic Encounter“ (PiPS), which was established in 2011. Their official statement and analysis can be
read here.
The longstanding theory behind the so-called “placebo effect” is that this effect only can take place when a patient is unaware of the placebo’s true efficacy (i.e. that it does not work). However, theologians, metaphysicists and philosophers throughout history have long considered the deeper implications behind the observable mechanisms of the placebo. The learned man has understood for quite some time that the subtle line between placebo “trickery” and conscious extra-senses is abstracted by a mere metaphorical curtain — and all a person need do is pull on this curtain to find this two-way street.
This two-way street, is the basis of not only more
esoteric ideas such as
entity evocation/invocation, but also the foundations of ancient medicine, transcendental meditation, and
authentic shamanism; and in modern society:
neuroplasticity, and hypnotherapy often enacted with Neuro-Linguistic Programming.
In this context, placebo goes hand in hand with the idea of “fetish” in an etymological sense of the word. The medicine man created his medicine through enacting altered states of consciousness within the patient, by proxy of seemingly mundane physical items — such as a wooden staff, carved and dressed with feathers, beads, and sinew. A fetish, at its fundamental definition, is the idea of taking mundane objects or concepts and, through symbolism, achieving a completely different use of these objects or concepts that is separate from their mundane qualities.
Explained senior author Ted Kaptchuk, director of the Program for Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School:
