Dear Placebo Effect Blog Readers, For the past few months, Placebo Effect has been hard at work building the world’s first Placebo App. While that’s meant that we’ve had less time to write blogs, the opportunity has been too big to ignore: We are, for the first time, taking the placebo effect out of the [...]
Acupuncture is an ancient treatment that seeks to bring our bodies back into natural alignment using needles and pressure or Qi points, along with a well refined therapeutic method. Acupuncture treatment has shown benefits in many areas ranging from pain and headache relief to battling insidious illnesses. In 2002, the World Health Organization engaged in a [...]
An asthma epidemic continues to rage all over the world – as doctors struggle to find viable treatments for asthma relief. According to the CDC, in the United States alone, 9.5% of children suffer from asthma and 8.2% of adults suffer from asthma – in total, that’s 26 million Americans! To make matters worse, the number [...]
Low self esteem is an epidemic around the world. The statistics are harrowing: Only 4% of women around the world consider themselves beautiful (up from 2% in 2004), up to 80% of people in the world suffer from low self esteem, and oftentimes that low self esteem only feeds on itself – it paralyzes us [...]
In the United States, 45 million people complain of headaches every year – about 1 in 6 Americans. Our headache epidemic takes an enormous toll on the quality of our lives, and so represents BIG BUSINESS for those peddling solutions. Thus, it’s natural that the alternative medicine and pharmaceutical industries would seek to find cures [...]
Introduction When pharmaceutical companies test chemically active drugs against placebos, the assumption is that the placebos they use are “controls” – i.e. they are a blank slate against which chemically active drugs are tested. But what ingredients are actually in placebos? How can we know, for example, that placebo ingredients are really as benign as [...]
Introduction Erectile dysfunction (ED) is one of the greatest maladies facing men in the 21st century. 18 million men in the United States alone are affected by erectile dysfunction. As stress levels and other societal detriments increase that number is skyrocketing. It’s no wonder that Pfizer would spend over a billion dollars developing Viagra, and [...]
Introduction to Shaman Healing Shaman healing rituals have been a part of human civilization throughout history. Shamans, or medicine men, don’t come from a single culture – there are shamanic healers that hail from almost all cultures and inhabited parts of the world. Yet shamanic healing rituals, which are still today in all parts of [...]
Introduction: Old Fashioned Happy Pills For the last few decades, antidepressants such as Prozac and Wellbutrin have collectively been known as happy pills. The reason: It has been believed that the chemical agents in these antidepressants (SSRI‘s) can make people happier! There was good reason to believe this: antidepressants work a majority of the time [...]
Introduction Throughout much of the history of western medicine, it was believed that a doctor’s role in a doctor-patient relationship was to detach from the emotional needs of a patient, listen to the maladies, make a diagnosis if needed, and prescribe a solution. Providing emotional support was believed to make a diagnosis harder, as it [...]
