[jwr]

While I would agree that "the placebo response has no clinical application", I would not discount it so easily. Modern medicine tries to sweep all kinds of things under the "placebo effect" rug. In general, whenever something happens to the human body that we cannot explain by chemistry and mechanics, we call it a "placebo effect". This view of medicine treats the human as two separate entities: the body and the mind.

I believe this is a narrow view. Our brains are not separate from our bodies and have a huge influence over what happens with us. And it seems that at lot of what we previously called "autonomic" systems can be influenced by the mind. This is something we do not understand, which is OK — but I don't think it is OK to mock anyone who says otherwise.

My views on these things changed after, having spent 8 years trying to cure joint pains, I finally got rid of them just by thinking (a simplification, but close enough). Oh, and the throat infections and allergies? Gone, too. That sort of killed my smug scientific approach, or more precisely, made it clear to me that our scientific tools are inadequate and that there are lots of things happening in our bodies that we a) do not understand, b) cannot meaningfully measure, c) cannot reason about in statistical studies. This doesn't mean it is impossible to measure those things, just that at present we do not know how to do it.

I also now believe that "medical training" is not it's all cracked up to be. And I learned that doctors really hate saying "I don't know".

So, I would much rather hear people say "something is happening that we do not understand" rather than discount any articles like this one as pure quackery.

[driverdan]

> In general, whenever something happens to the human body that we cannot explain by chemistry and mechanics, we call it a "placebo effect".

If by "we" you mean you, sure. If you mean scientists I call bullshit. You're going to need a good citation to make that claim.

> having spent 8 years trying to cure joint pains, I finally got rid of them just by thinking

Not surprising. Pain is the one thing you expect to be able to change by "thinking." Pain is perception and placebos (and thinking) change perception.

> Oh, and the throat infections and allergies? Gone, too.

Now we're going down anecdote road. You do realize that allergies change as you age right? My anecdotes: until I was in my late teens / early 20's I didn't have allergies. Then suddenly one year I had them badly. Years later they went away again. My dad never had allergies until they came on strong in his 50's.

Similarly infections come and go.

> And I learned that doctors really hate saying "I don't know".

Good doctors don't. The problem is that the medical profession is full of egos. Egos don't go well with admitting you don't know or are wrong.

[jwr]

In other words, you have no idea why the pain comes and goes, or why allergies come and go.

Which is fine.

I'm just trying to say that whenever we don't know, we have a tendency to reject and ridicule any new hypothesis, especially if it's in the field where we also have no idea on how to measure things. So, while agreeing that a scientific approach (measure, quantify, prove, etc) is better, I would not reject nor ridicule hypotheses that we can neither prove nor disprove. Personally, I find them interesting, as they lie on the boundary of what we know and might offer promising research in the future.

[I don't want to pick up on your simplification wrt pain, so I'll just note it's huge. Psychosomatic pain is not about "perception" at all, it's real, and the symptoms are real.]