This, about the mental basis of the physical, harmonizes nicely with my piece below about the physical basis of the mental.

The Patient’s Knowledge About a Therapy Affects the Therapy Outcome. This is essentially an empirical demonstration that the placebo effect plays an important role in the effectiveness of medical treatment. Most studies are “placebo-controlled”, that is they hold constant the impact of the subject’s knowledge that they are receiving a treatment and compare the ‘objective’ differences between treatments. This study does the opposite, holding the ‘objective’ effects constant and comparing their effects on two groups of subjects. Those in one group knew they were receiving a treatment and from those in the other group that fact was hidden. To put it succinctly, this overwhelmingly significant finding is that “the hidden administrations of pharmacological and nonpharmacological therapies are less effective than the open ones.”

I am not at all surprised. I have long maintained that the placebo response should not be dismissed as a null hypothesis (‘That treatment only works because the patient believes it does’), but rather that enlisting the patient’s intrinsic healing abilities by enrolling them in a shared belief system is a core element of the healer’s work. This is true whether we are talking about a tribal shaman or a lab-coated modern physician-scientist. And it is true whether we are talking about supposedly ‘physical’ ailments or psychological ones. This is another, important, nail in the coffin of the outmoded notion of mind-body distinctions. I’m going to beg the question of whether we are necessarily talking about some kind of mind-over-matter effects when appreciating the importance of belief to healing, or whether it is a meaningful question to ask. I personally get enough mileage out of my conviction that the material interactions of the CNS with the rest of bodily processes are infinitely more complicated and interwoven than we can conceive of.

It is not a new notion emerging out of recent research findings only, of course — mind-body unity is a core conceptual fundament of the abiding and ubiquitous human practices we refer to as mystical or spiritual pursuits across cultures — and this paper will not be revolutionary, in a very important sense. This is such a recondite provocation to conventional, paradigmatic ways of thinking about things that I predict you will see very little mention of it anywhere. The whole premise of mind-body unity challenges the conceptual framework under which most people operate (and have operated, perhaps, ever since the origins of consciousness and the development of the essentially human capacity for a ‘theory of mind’) so profoundly that it can only be ignored, resisted, marginalized or trivialized wherever it rears its ugly head to threaten the mainstream.

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