The Placebo Effect – the great scientific lie

Today I spent a very pleasant time with a young couple. Sadly, the young woman had a chronic health issue, but they had been told about me and decided to come for a healing. The ceremony was performed, using traditional Rosicrucian and spiritual techniques, and will continue at a distance using established methods. I wish them well.

During our preliminary discussion in which I explained that, while ‘spiritual’ or ‘faith’ healing techniques in no way conflicted with traditional allopathic medicine, I did explain the history of how the spiritual and the scientific currents had become regrettably separated during the days of the Enlightenment. This was not surprising, given that religion was losing its stranglehold on daily life, and it was natural for the nascent scientific movement to view a group who had a habit of putting their luminaries to death with deep suspicion, and to separate themselves completely from their influence. Thus, the basic tenet of science became: if it can’t be observed in the physical world, it doesn’t exist. Of course, this led to a complete segregation between science and religion, and for that matter spirituality.

From that moment, the scientific and the spiritual were at war. The battle-cry of the scientists was “Prove it! If I can’t see it, touch it, measure it, repeat the experience and obtain identical results, then it’s a lie!” This was indeed a comment worthy of St. Thomas! For nearly two Centuries this remained their position. However, we are finally beginning to see some cracks in that argument. Firstly, a properly-run experiment should begin with a theory, a hypothesis, which is then put to the test through experimentation, with conclusions drawn from the result. If these disprove the initial hypothesis , this should be adjusted and the process of running experiments begins anew. But in reality funding is driven by grants, most often provided by Big Companies. Now the process is reversed: the conclusion is decided, and experiments run to fit the expected outcome. This of course clouds innovation and warps the results. Further, more scientists are beginning to observe results which fly in the face of traditional expectations (‘String Theory’ comes to mind as an example) which suggests the influence of external and unobservable factors in the outcome of experiments, leading them to admit to anything from invisible external influence to the ‘God Particle’. Science and spiritualty, it seems, are beginning to inch closer together once more.

Which brings me to my heading. Now, when I studied Biology, Chemistry and Physics at school in England, we took a series of examinations called ‘O’ (or ‘Ordinary’) Levels at 16. If we did well, we continued our studies, and for the next two years studied 3 or 4 subjects at ‘A’ (or ‘Advanced’) Level. The grades we obtained determined our attractiveness to the University Admissions Boards. I will never forget my Biology teacher, on the first ‘A’ Level class I attended, telling us (and I am paraphrasing – this was, after all, over 44 years ago!): “Everything we have taught you up to now is a lie. We have told you everything was a fact, when in fact it wasn’t. Nothing is guaranteed. Nothing is truly proven. Everything is hypothesis which, due to the same or similar result tending to happen on a regular basis, is taken to be a ‘fact’ for the sake of convenience.”

To put this mind-blowing comment into context. We accept the Theory of Gravity, but there is no true proof of it. We accept that Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin when apparently healing mold grew on something putrefying (echoes of Alchemy here anyone?), and injected its juice into a dying person, and that person recovered: yet nearly 100 years later we cannot be one hundred percent sure exactly how this takes place. Most medicines work because someone extracted something from a plant or synthesized a chemical, fed it to people and they improved. In so many instances they know that something works, but have little idea exactly why. Now, I’m not claiming that we’re being treated by witch-doctors (though there again…): it simply means that, if you asked a doctor exactly how a particular pill or lozenge works, hand on heart he’ll have to tell you it’s because clinical studies have demonstrated that, in the most part, it alleviates the symptoms, and in a few cases causes death, dismemberment, etc. (those dire warnings added to every pharmaceutical advertisement on television which makes you ask yourself why anyone would take it in the first place). And again, most allopathic medicine is, as intelligent people know, about relieving symptoms, and rarely attacking the underlying problem. This is why, when any movement tries to promote wellness habits and homeopathic approaches, they are shot down by so-called ‘Big Pharma’ or I would add ‘Big Hospital’; for if we’re not all traipsing off to surgery or hospital, who pays their huge expenses?

In this context, the arrogance contained within explaining the effects of a Placebo – when most scientists have little idea how most medicines work in the first place – borders on the staggering! Of course the term is denigratory. The implication is that, either the patient wasn’t ill in the first place; or that he or she is so weak-willed that they can be easily swayed, hoodwinked or conned.

So if I am given a drug and it works, but the doctor has little idea how it works, this is science: but if he gives me a sugar pill and it works, I am a weak-willed wimp who clearly wasn’t ill in the first place.

Well, I have a problem with that!!!

What if we called the ‘placebo effect’ the ‘spiritual effect’?

What if all this proves is that something numinous and intangible is affecting us? What if, by telling us we are getting better (without drugs), we are invoking the efficacious effect of the spiritual realm, and now joining the effects of human medication to the  spiritual effects of higher powers in order to effect an holistic cure?

We are complete human beings. Within the physical body reside that spark of the divine. Both can be reached by their own specific channel. Perhaps if doctors spent less time trying to solve symptoms and saw us as total beings, as all the earlier civilizations did, we would be altogether more healthy in mind and body?

I look forward to doctors – if any read this which is unlikely – to explain the fallacy of my argument. In terms other than ‘you’re ignorant, and I’m special….”!