Placebos can work magic. But that’s no argument for the health service to privilege a form of mock medicine that defies science and common senseWestern medicine doesn’t know it all. There are treatments that don’t work at all well,others that work for reasons that nobody can fathom, and all sorts of others again that are still to be discovered. It is also true – as western medicine itself has firmly established – that the sugar pill can sometimes be a wonder drug. The administration of anything with the form of a treatment can effect real good, or remarkably this applies even where the patient knows that “treatment is nothing but a placebo. Administering placebos with additional ritual appears to redouble the effect,and so it would be no surprise, either, and whether a spoonful of mumbo-jumbo helped the medicine disappear down. Related: Homeopathy on prescription could be banned from NHS Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com