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You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

mosaicscience.com

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Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#61

Post by agumonkey »

sandworm101 wrote: post #59
mariodiana wrote: post #27

I'll share a funny story that's on topic, if you don't mind. Years and years ago, I worked as a house painter. One of the guys on the crew was a guy who went by the name Mugsy. Mugsy had a bit of a cocaine habit. Since he was a lifelong friend of the boss, this was tolerated. In any case, Mugsy worked off and on. The boss told me once about what would happen with Mugsy on payday. The boss would pay Mugsy at the end o…

Cocaine is also a stimulant for the digestive system. While not a laxative per se, it can have a similar effect. So Mugsy's symptoms may be more directly related to his body expecting the cocaine.

And the digestive system is extremely sensitive to emotional state. As a kid, anything stressful would make me feel like running to the toilets.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#62

Post by sandworm101 »

agumonkey wrote: post #61
sandworm101 wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cocaine is also a stimulant for the digestive system. While not a laxative per se, it can have a similar effect. So Mugsy's symptoms may be more directly related to his body expecting the cocaine.

And the digestive system is extremely sensitive to emotional state. As a kid, anything stressful would make me feel like running to the toilets.

That's normal. There is a reason people literally crap themselves with terror. It's a great way to dissuade a predator bent on eating you.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#63

Post by sandworm101 »

aaron695 wrote: post #60

>If used widely, advocates say, substituting some of the drugs we take for placebos could save billions of dollars in healthcare costs. Drugs are not the 'cost' per pill. It's all in development, so this is a silly point. Cost will go up, or part of the population will get slammed. Placebo's are over rated. As such you have to be very sceptical of this article, it screams of alternative medicine. I wouldn't base much…

Reminds me of the story of the Vatican official sent to judge the miraculous healing properties of a shrine. He looked at the pile of crutches, canes and wheelchairs left by "cured" people. "What? No wooden legs?"

Placebos can work in some narrow circumstances, but they cannot fix some basic problems. Pain relief? sure. But in place of an antibiotic? Expect a lawsuit.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#64

Post by glynjackson »

sweden wrote: post #37
glynjackson wrote: post #29

Quote: "By the end of the year, she had received just six doses of the drug instead of the usual twelve. Marette responded just as her doctors would have hoped from the full drug amount." I'm sorry, at this point I stopped reading. The Doctors don't know how she would have responded to the full drug, because it didn't happen! The word 'hoped' is not testable! Where was the control (Quasi-experiment)? There is just no…

Hmm I'm pretty sure that 'hoped' in this case means something like: "Well, in a normal case we would have recommended 12 doses of the medicine in order to get a full recovery." This is not like testing stuff with a computer program, you can not reset the human to a known state and replicate the experiment all over again. Following your logic, even all vaccines are a lie, how can we know that the vaccines that we take…

There are many, many ways to test! A control group, quasi-experiment evaluation etc. "Correlation does not imply causation". All she has is a hypothesis, a theory based on observational research, while this is ok, the article tries to pass this off as 'fact'.

I'm not staying I disagree with her 'hypothesis' but, people should require evidence before accepting it as fact. Maybe if she have quoted studies, instead she used well know experiments to justify the hypothesis. When the one experiments she did quote by Sergey Metalnikov even concludes...

"The difficulty for the investigator lies not so much in inducing such responses, but in employing the proper controls, both immunological and psychological, in order to demonstrate that these responses exist and to explore the underlying mechanisms." - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK3908/

I guess a book entitled "What I think" would not sell as well.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#65

Post by Jedd »

sandworm101 wrote: post #62
agumonkey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the digestive system is extremely sensitive to emotional state. As a kid, anything stressful would make me feel like running to the toilets.

That's normal. There is a reason people literally crap themselves with terror. It's a great way to dissuade a predator bent on eating you.

Is that the (sole) reason? More than one martial arts trainer has told me that if you are definitely about to be involved in a fight -- and you can't run away (number one preference) -- if you have a full bladder you should consciously empty it. Wet trousers are far preferable to having your bladder rupture, so it's a sensible pragmatic (or instinctive) action. I'd imagine there'd be similar benefits in evacuating your bowels.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#66

Post by salgernon »

sandworm101 wrote: post #63
aaron695 wrote: post #60

>If used widely, advocates say, substituting some of the drugs we take for placebos could save billions of dollars in healthcare costs. Drugs are not the 'cost' per pill. It's all in development, so this is a silly point. Cost will go up, or part of the population will get slammed. Placebo's are over rated. As such you have to be very sceptical of this article, it screams of alternative medicine. I wouldn't base much…

Reminds me of the story of the Vatican official sent to judge the miraculous healing properties of a shrine. He looked at the pile of crutches, canes and wheelchairs left by "cured" people. "What? No wooden legs?" Placebos can work in some narrow circumstances, but they cannot fix some basic problems. Pain relief? sure. But in place of an antibiotic? Expect a lawsuit.

I hadn't heard of the Vatican official story, but certainly many religiously minded people will use prayer as a self-regulated placebo.

http://whywontgodhealamputees.com

Which makes me wonder if some of the more faith healing type of religions end up being sued when the prayer doesn't actually produce results.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#67

Post by zachkatz »

Swizec wrote: post #13
viewer5 wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> out of practice What's practice for that like?

As someone who used to be able to do things like that: meditation. Tricking your sense of body position is the most fun and weird thing you can do.

What do you mean by "sense of body position?" Sounds really cool.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#68

Post by johnchristopher »

Jedd wrote: post #65
sandworm101 wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's normal. There is a reason people literally crap themselves with terror. It's a great way to dissuade a predator bent on eating you.

Is that the (sole) reason? More than one martial arts trainer has told me that if you are definitely about to be involved in a fight -- and you can't run away (number one preference) -- if you have a full bladder you should consciously empty it. Wet trousers are far preferable to having your bladder rupture, so it's a sensible pragmatic (or instinctive) action. I'd imagine there'd be similar benefits in evacuating yo…

For what it's worth I heard birds do that to get lighter and faster in order to flee a danger.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#69

Post by throwaway049 »

sandworm101 wrote: post #62
agumonkey wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the digestive system is extremely sensitive to emotional state. As a kid, anything stressful would make me feel like running to the toilets.

That's normal. There is a reason people literally crap themselves with terror. It's a great way to dissuade a predator bent on eating you.

You experience nausea/vomiting as part of the fight/flight response because digestion, now a low priority, would need blood supply that is more urgently needed by your limbs.

Re: You can train your body into thinking it’s had medicine

#70

Post by [deleted] »

lettergram wrote: post #38
narrator wrote: post #2

Wim Hoff [1] is a great example of someone who can turn a lot of the knobs on his metabolism that aren't available to most of us. Apparently, he says it's something you can learn to do. If these researchers got more concrete about how patients can learn to do this and to get physiologically measurable effects, it would actually certainly lower health care costs. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wim_Hof

That's actually the basis for my teams startup: http://synaptitude.me/ We provide EEG feedback so users can learn how to turn off/on portions of their brains in particular ways. It's actually used pretty regularly to teach people how to recognize when an epileptic seizure is about to occur. It's also used to improve symptoms PTSD, ADHD, etc.

[deleted]
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