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The Earthing Movie
Nominal Animal:
Biologically, 'grounding' is utter bullshit. Psychologically, it is a powerful tool and can really help with certain common difficult mental ailments.
For example, a common exercise to alleviate anxiety (especially when associated with depression) is to focus on the present, on the sensorium, and simply observe; and to avoid conscious thinking. It shares many aspects with meditation, obviously.
'Grounding' can be taken as a wider application, combining a psychological narrative to help mentally 'connect' one to their surroundings, with associated mythology that helps shift the overall mental state to a more productive, calm, 'grounded' (as in 'externally supported, not alone'), positive one. It is pure psychology, but uses scents and tactile sensorium to bypass the conscious part of the human mind. In my opinion, it belongs to the same class of 'tricks' as optical illusions and sleight of hand, except with very useful results.
It is sad, but absolutely expected, to see people take the core idea and run hog wild with it. It is what humans always do, when they think they found something useful.
thm_w:
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on September 30, 2023, 11:13:47 pm ---So ultimately, my point was that for the placebo effect to be effective, someone still needs to lie to someone else on some level, whatever the level the lie is at. Just because you tell someone "this is just a placebo" doesn't mean that it won't work as such, which is pretty much what this article is saying as far as I can tell. Again, my point was about the ethical use of placebo, and it's still a question I for one have no answer to.
--- End quote ---
Doctors are already doing it: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/06/half-german-doctors-prescribe-placebos
Its tough, because even the most common drugs can have side effects and dangers (eg aspirin). So if you immediately prescribe every person that walks through the door with a drug relevant to the request, you can be doing more harm than good. Placebo is 100% safe in comparison.
IMO if the complaint is not so serious, if requested you can prescribe a placebo as a first attempt along lifestyle changes, monitor and maybe it works well enough, and if it doesn't come back and try a real drug.
I guess if that still ethically bothers you, replace placebo with multivitamin.
https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20013484/
SiliconWizard:
--- Quote from: thm_w on October 06, 2023, 09:49:33 pm ---
--- Quote from: SiliconWizard on September 30, 2023, 11:13:47 pm ---So ultimately, my point was that for the placebo effect to be effective, someone still needs to lie to someone else on some level, whatever the level the lie is at. Just because you tell someone "this is just a placebo" doesn't mean that it won't work as such, which is pretty much what this article is saying as far as I can tell. Again, my point was about the ethical use of placebo, and it's still a question I for one have no answer to.
--- End quote ---
Doctors are already doing it: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2011/mar/06/half-german-doctors-prescribe-placebos
Its tough, because even the most common drugs can have side effects and dangers (eg aspirin). So if you immediately prescribe every person that walks through the door with a drug relevant to the request, you can be doing more harm than good. Placebo is 100% safe in comparison.
IMO if the complaint is not so serious, if requested you can prescribe a placebo as a first attempt along lifestyle changes, monitor and maybe it works well enough, and if it doesn't come back and try a real drug.
I guess if that still ethically bothers you, replace placebo with multivitamin.
https://sci-hub.se/https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20013484/
--- End quote ---
Yep - agree with the points above.
I am personally not particularly "bothered" by using placebos for the reasons you expose here (and yes, this is commonly used routinely by physicians). The question is more like a fundamental one, and one correlated question I raised was that if this kind of use doesn't cause any particular ethical problem, why would we ban some uses of it and not others, what are exactly our criterions, are those criterions *always* really rational, and so on, ...
I took the example of homeopathy (but you could use Earthing also, or whatever). Actually, if you read a bit about the history of homeopathy, this appears to be what the point of its "inventor" exactly was: first do no harm for the minor ailments, and sure he made up this whole BS around it to make the placebo effect potentially stronger. I don't think it was ever meant to cure cancer (for instance), which is often the counter-argument we hear about banning homeopathy altogether. Although even so, one may argue that the placebo effect probably still has its place with cancer treatment on some level, even if it's (probably) not going to cure it. So on the surface, I guess you could say that using placebos is all fine and dandy until its apparent effectiveness in some cases could make some patients think that they don't need anything else to be cured. That's the usual argument.
So, that's just actually more questions than answers here. I'm again not saying I'm against, but it's more of a rhetorical or philosophical question if you will. Indeed, the placebo effect relies on lies (to others / to oneself). So the underlying question is, whenever is it ethical to use lies to achieve some goal? (Your answer may be: as long as it does no harm, but I don't think it's quite satisfying as an answer to a pretty uh, deep question overall.)
TimFox:
When thinking about the placebo effect and related topics, I am reminded of a project I was on, involving cardiac monitoring.
Not being educated on medical and biological stuff, I did some reading about the interesting electrochemical relaxation oscillator that governed the heartbeat, and what could go wrong (arrhythmia) after surface damage to the heart muscle screws up the circuitry.
I learned that while respiration could be controlled directly by nervous activity originating in the brain (holding your breath), evolution had not given us that direct control over the heart (a good thing); changes in heart timing respond to chemical signals through the bloodstream.
I didn't get as far as how that indirect control system responds to mental activity.
(Careful technical language varies with different sciences: we had a cardiologist consultant who crossed out all of my references to "pulse", as in electronic waveform, and replaced them with "impulse", since he only used pulse in the cardiac sense.)
Infraviolet:
To add to my Reply #3, just noticed that EEVblog is running Rumble and Bitchute channels mirroring the Youtube videos. Well done. That's what we need for making Youtube competitors worthwhile, enough of YT's content mirrored on them to bulk up the amount of things they can offer. If YT ever decides that it is against the guidance of some government or another to host electronics vids (because if people know about electronics they might fix things, and if they can fix things then corporations who want planned obsolescence and prop up political parties might lose profit), there'll be a safe refuge where the censorship doesn't reach.
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