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Is Prayer No More Than a Placebo?

June 25, 2014 By christianscienceminnesota Leave a Comment

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My Massachusetts colleague, Ingrid Peschke, discusses how prayer can pick up where placebos leave off.  Here’s Ingrid…

Debates abound on the power of the placebo.  There’s one man who has made it his mission to try and settle that debate, or at least shed significant light on it.

Described as wanting to “broaden the definition of healing” (The New Yorker), Ted Kaptchuk is considered the leading researcher on placebos as a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard.

Kaptchuk’s research points to a question often left unanswered in medical treatment:  To what extent does a patient’s thought affect outcomes? The unseen, yet powerful elements of healing, such as hope in a certain result, may, according to his research, “fundamentally contribute to the improvement of patient outcomes” (programinplacebostudies.org).

Kaptchuk was one of the experts on a panel discussion I attended at Harvard designed to explore the topic, “Placebo and Prayer:  Why Prayer Practice Might Help.”

I’ve heard skeptics compare prayer to placebos.  And while I’m no expert on the placebo effect, I have had a lot of experience seeing the effects of prayer on health.

I would suggest the prayer referred to as placebo is based on blind belief.  That kind of prayer, I will agree, is no different than placebo.  But the prayer that has depth of conviction, that seeks to understand and appeal to a distinctly divine Mind, ceases to rely on the human mind for healing.

please click here to read the rest in its original context…

To be healthy – focus on HEALTH, not disease

April 8, 2014 By christianscienceminnesota Leave a Comment

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If your test comes back negative, you’re glad because “They found nothing.”

Is that really true?  Was nothing found?

Yes, the diseased condition or problem they were looking for isn’t there.  Then what is there?  Health.  And health is not nothing, it’s something.  Something was found.

It’s popular to think of health just as the absence of disease.  I remember being struck by this years ago while in a “health” food store.  Every product was geared not on wellness, but on treating or warding off sickness.

Most agree that our health care system is primarily designed for the treatment, management and sometimes prevention of disease rather than establishing and maintaining health.

Recent efforts to promote healthy lifestyles as a path to wellness mostly emphasize nutrition and exercise.  There’s been little shift in how we think of health.  People still see these lifestyle changes as strategies to evade disease.

Accepted logic says that disease is inevitable and you deal with it either through mainstream or alternative treatment, management and prevention.  But that’s upside down.  What about gaining a better understanding of health itself?

Health and wellness are our normal state of being.  Shouldn’t we begin with health as inevitable, lasting and powerful and disease as a detour?  Or at least with health as the rule and sickness as the exception?

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Expectation — the ultimate placebo effect

May 3, 2012 By christianscienceminnesota Leave a Comment

Everyone knows that the placebo effect depends on not knowing that it’s a placebo, right?  Wrong!!

Here’s the link to a 1/10/12 piece from, The Wall Street Journal, called “Why Placebos Work Wonders:  from weight loss to fertility, new legitimacy for ‘fake’ treatments”.

The author, Shirley S. Wang, gives several impressive examples of effective placebo treatments but also reports this:  “It doesn’t seem to matter whether people know they are getting a placebo and not a ‘real’ treatment.”  What?!

She mentions a study done by Dr. Ted Kaptchuk, director of Harvard’s Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter.   Patients were informed that what they were taking was made with inert ingredients and yet they still had beneficial results.

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About Joel

Joel Magnes Hi, I’m Joel Magnes, writing about the connection between our thinking and our health -- focusing on how spirituality and prayer can have a positive impact on our well-being.   I'm a practitioner of Christian Science, with over 25 years of expertise and experience in prayer-based healing.  And I serve as the Christian Science Committee on Publication for Minnesota; the church's media and legislative liaison. Contact Joel HERE.

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