The situation is even more complex.
A few years ago there was a BBC documentary on placebo's (I cannot find it back. A google search gives many such documentaries but not the one I looked for). The most striking experiment was from Harvard university where they gave a number of people placebo's, telling them that they were placebo's. One of the participants was a medical student with a very bad case of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). She knew very well what a placebo is. Yet it cured her IBS. Until the experiment was over and she did no longer get the placebo. She moved heaven and earth to get more of the stuff, but because it wasn't a registered medication she could not.
If you say that hypnosis is like a placebo and once you know that it should not work, apparently that may not be the whole truth. We still do not know how the thinking mind can/will influence the parts that operate without us being aware of it, like the whole defence mechanism. It is clear that placebo's can trick the mind into controlling that to some extend. My expectation is that with hypnosis this should also be possible, but how is probably still a big mystery.
There are occasionally cases of cancers that are cured against all expectations of the specialists. Does this involve such a type of control? Could this be achieved with hypnosis?
I am a master of Reiki, and as far as I can figure out, it works on the same level. It gives the (right) patient the confidence to heal themselves. But how that works internally, I have no idea.
It will not be easy to really determine whether an effect is due to hypnosis or something else, because people usually do many other things at the same time. Hence one needs lots of statistics at the least. That is why I said in an earlier post that the only experiment I can think of and that is double blind is something with subliminals where neither the patient nor the therapist knows what is in the subliminals.
A few years ago there was a BBC documentary on placebo's (I cannot find it back. A google search gives many such documentaries but not the one I looked for). The most striking experiment was from Harvard university where they gave a number of people placebo's, telling them that they were placebo's. One of the participants was a medical student with a very bad case of IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). She knew very well what a placebo is. Yet it cured her IBS. Until the experiment was over and she did no longer get the placebo. She moved heaven and earth to get more of the stuff, but because it wasn't a registered medication she could not.
If you say that hypnosis is like a placebo and once you know that it should not work, apparently that may not be the whole truth. We still do not know how the thinking mind can/will influence the parts that operate without us being aware of it, like the whole defence mechanism. It is clear that placebo's can trick the mind into controlling that to some extend. My expectation is that with hypnosis this should also be possible, but how is probably still a big mystery.
There are occasionally cases of cancers that are cured against all expectations of the specialists. Does this involve such a type of control? Could this be achieved with hypnosis?
I am a master of Reiki, and as far as I can figure out, it works on the same level. It gives the (right) patient the confidence to heal themselves. But how that works internally, I have no idea.
It will not be easy to really determine whether an effect is due to hypnosis or something else, because people usually do many other things at the same time. Hence one needs lots of statistics at the least. That is why I said in an earlier post that the only experiment I can think of and that is double blind is something with subliminals where neither the patient nor the therapist knows what is in the subliminals.
eady contain information in the respective physical domain (I just hope I'm somewhat accurate with the wording). Why differentiate between the effects it causes on and in the skin or the damage it does to the ear vs. whatever the brain is able to "emit in measurable ways" after having processed the neural signals in order to call something placebo or not?
