The Placebo Effect is the most promising area of medicine and one of the most neglected.
Placebos work consistently for some percentage of people, in every imaginable form of pretend therapy, pretend surgery, and pretend prescription. They are more reliably effective than most “real” treatments. Oh, for almost no cost and without the side effects.
Everyone takes the effect for granted, but rarely is it pursued beyond, “If you think you’re being treated your condition improves.”
Surely this evidence of the mind-body connection is the most important possible part of health! Understanding the effect, and how to improve and direct the mind to effect the body, should be the number one most fascinating and most researched part of medical science!
Instead, chemical combinations with much less reliable effect and with myriad unknown and deleterious unintended effects are studied ad nauseam, compared against placebo (which they usually fail to outperform), and then all the head-scratching is about why the chemical didn’t work instead of why the placebo did.
The most fertile, broadly applicable, reliable, affordable, safe, and sophisticated form of treatment the world has ever encountered gets short shrift. It is one of the most fascinating mysteries, sure to lead down rabbit holes that alter and improve our understanding of the most fundamental aspects of reality, yet hardly any “experts” seems curious about it. (A decent definition of an “Expert” is someone who has killed their curiosity with credentials).
In fact, when a positive result is discovered to be caused by Placebo, it is treated as a lesser citizen. “Oh that’s not legitimate, it was all only placebo effect.” Only Placebo? Only an improvement in health brought about by belief? Only healing through mindset shift; ideas generating direct physical results?
The most present and accessible form of treatment resides in the mind of every individual. We have no idea how much it can do, how for it can go, and how we might be able to enhance the power of our minds to improve our bodies.
What could be more exciting to a health researcher or practitioner than that?