| > 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. |
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.]