Thanks it sounds good, just hope it works, and keeps working.
I think you missed most of the thread, but as for me, I will take something that works, whether it is scientifically sound or not. I think most others will also. Science is not God yet.
But that’s just it - it doesn’t “work.” The placebo effect works. You’re just selecting one form of packaging over another.
But that’s fine - there will always be gullible people and people hellbent on finding the truth that must exist outside of “mainstream” treatments. I can no more endorse people spending money on these than I can people paying psychics, astrologers or dowsers, even though folks may feel just as content using those services as well.
Just because there is a sucker born every minute doesn’t mean that its okay to take advantage of them.
It does work! What works is mind over matter.
There is such a thing as the spirituality of mankind. A spiritual principle is thought creates reality, so if you want to feel better you can change your thoughts to do so. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but that is a quick outline.
When you believe you already know, there is no room left for learning. However, the placebo effect is just one small element of the principle.
Please don’t call me ignorant or crazy or sucker, the day will come when you will understand also.
It should cost as much as it takes to work, and no more.
I used to run a school teaching herbalism and acupuncture, attached to a licensed acupuncturists’ office. The L.Ac’s were also teachers, and they ran a student clinic with students seeing the patients. Student clinic cost $10, and most of the time, for most of the clients, it worked. Occasionally, we’d get a stubborn case who would insist on stopping the clinic and going to see the L.Ac. (teacher) in their private practice for $60 a session. They’d get the same exact treatment (all student treatments were overseen and authorized by the L.Ac. before beginning) but from a person with initials after their name, and now it would work. Why? I have no fucking idea. Sometimes people need to feel that they are doing something hard or expensive in order to allow themselves to get better.
From a practical and mystical perspective, I do believe that an energy exchange of some sort - money, work barter, etc. is required for healing to be at its most effective. Mine wasn’t the only clinic I’ve seen with better results the higher on the sliding scale you went, and it had nothing to do with the quality of care - the L.Ac. didn’t know what each client paid at the front desk on their way out, that was all handled by me.
But its cost is zero. It is brought to the circumstance by the individual, so taking one dime from them is unethical. However, you run into the confound that as soon as you charge them nothing, they will start to think that the [insert flim-flam here] is worthless, and its effect will be diminished.
It didn’t work in one case and did in the other likely because the placebo effect, as I noted before, is a response expectancy.
If I don’t expect that students will be able to do anything for me, and if what they are doing has no actual effect in and of itself, nothing will happen.
Indeed I did not…last time I try ‘Doper’ humour… 
Thank goodness - glad to hear that science still exists.
You obviously find this as a convincing argument for your belief that the physical is a ‘manifestation of the spirit’. Whereas the simpler explanation is that the brain (which creates thought) is connected physically to the rest of one’s body, so it isn’t hard to believe that the brain can influence healing processes, and of course pain, which is simply the brain’s reaction to physical distress.
‘Thought creates reality’ and ‘Mind over matter’ both sound terribly profound and mysterious, but actually go no further than to say that the mind/brain have an influence on the rest of the body. Humans can achieve feats of will, but are fundamentally confined to their own body. My mind can assist my body in combatting pain. My mind can tell my hands to build a brick wall - in that sense, I agree - ‘Thought creates reality’. To suggest that thought can directly influence reality beyond your body’s periphery is a lovely idea but should be kept in fairy stories where it belongs.
I absolutely agree. Which is why instead of constantly, unswervingly promoting a reality based on wish-fulfilment, anecdotal personal salvation and happy endings, I try to keep learning from a tradition of constantly renewing knowledge - science.
But it only works if it is the third treatment tried. 
There is really nothing profound about mind over matter. It has been known for thousands of years. Thought does create reality, your thoughts turn into actions that create your reality. Nothing happens without thought, it is the first thing. Now as for the brain creating you, it doesn’t, plenty of evidence to the contrary. I posted the link earlier, but will post it here. Good solid research by qualified scientists working in qualified universities. I am not promoting, well, I guess I am promoting happy endings. No reason to stop that.
If you are learning from a tradition of constantly renewing knowledge called science then here is a slice for you to learn from.
Which is why I said it should cost as much as it takes to be effective, and no more.
But I acknowledge we’re coming at this from two different viewpoints. You think anything that heals by placebo is unethical and should be stopped. I want to use the placebo effect intentionally for its healing factor*. I think it’s a great safe, non-invasive, side-effect free method of treatment. But it cannot, for whatever reason, be triggered alone. It needs (apparently) someone or something else to engage it. What we need to do is figure out how to reliably engage that effect in the majority of people. Someone who figures that out and can do it consistently deserves to be compensated for it.
Since the exchange of money itself is part of that placebo effect (perhaps - I’d like to see more studies done on this than my personal observations), then the amount of money charged should be based, at least in part, on the minimum required to engage the healing effect. So if my taking $50 from you and waving a sheet of paper at your head makes you feel better, I should charge $50. If my taking $25 from you and waving a sheet of paper at your head doesn’t make you feel better, I should charge more - up to the point at which it’s generally effective. Ethically, I think, I shouldn’t charge you $1000 if $50 works. Although we do need to make sure that amount covers my cost to buy head waving paper and rent an appropriate room in which to see you and to pay my personal rent and bills (if I’m paper-waving full time), and that gets us in the realm of what everyone else who sees clients all day needs to make to support themselves.
*although I should be clear that I don’t think that either acupuncture or herbalism’s effects are solely due to the placebo effect. If plants can kill you, they have active chemicals in them. If they have active chemicals in them, they can heal you. Scientists know this, it’s why more than half of the drugs on the market today come from plants. Those who warn of herbs’ dangers while proclaiming their worthlessness are being logically inconsistent. Acupuncture we’ve already discussed recently and my views on it are already known. If not, search.
You seem to shoehorn that link to the ‘Near Death Experiences’ site into every other post. It would be a major hijack to start discussing the after-life here, but if you want to discuss it in a separate thread I’m sure I’ll chip in.
More precisely, I think that anything that has no actual effect other than to activate a placebo effect must at the very least be properly identified to the person as such. Informed consent and all that. I think it’s misleading, again, to say that [insert flim-flam here] “heals” by placebo. It doesn’t - if the intervention does nothing beyond elicit the placebo effect then it is by definition inert, or without effect. It doesn’t work or heal or do anything in terms of changing the person.
Wasn’t looking for discussion. This is research that shows we are not our brains. Was using it to disprove what you said in your post. It is good science, if you wish to discuss it start a new thread.
Another way to look at it is healing by faith or belief. Healing by thought. Thought is something, something very important.
But can you “properly identify” it as a placebo and still have it be effective? That, I think, is the question. What is “properly identify”? Do we have to use the word “placebo” in order to obtain informed consent?
Certainly if one wears a white labcoat and bears “M.D.” after their name, the patient is going to assume that the pills given to them are not placebos. Even if, as I suggested before, the doctor carefully points out that he doesn’t know why they work. The word “placebo” itself, I think, will negate the effect. People equate “placebo” with “useless” or “no effect”.
The problem with totally informed consent to a placebo is that the explanation of a placebo - I think, again, I have no studies to consult - itself changes the treatment. It’s no longer a placebo, but a useless sugar pill. It will no longer engage the placebo effect if the patient knows that’s what’s expected.
Generally, 99.9% of the time, I’m all about informed consent. This might be one area in which I allow some obfuscation in the moment, as long as one is not outright making shit up or using words which are outright lies. Explain that it’s unexplainable, couch it in metaphors, talk about spirit or chi or mind/body connection if you like. Don’t say it intercepts chemical messengers, relieves inflammation or pulls toxins from the colon - those are medical claims which should have medical science to back them up. They’re the purview of one specific branch of healing. I’d be just as irritated if you told a patient their Prozac increased chi in the brain. While I’d like to see us all working together, we do have separate, defined and discrete vocabularies that should only be used in the context of those modalities.
Okay, you want to use the site to bolster your claims of a vague intangible spirit infesting the material world. But when the site says things like this:
and
Then I know that your point of view will be immune to questioning. Keep your terms as vague as possible, pity the fool who doesn’t ‘know’ the truth of what you’re spouting. Watertight. But don’t go calling it ‘good science’.
I think you have confused the link I provided with some of my other writings. The link provided is good science. Conducted by qualified scientists, working at qualified universities, and published in qualified scientific journals. Since I did not conduct the research you should address your concerns about the research to the ones that did do the research. I believe this is only the tip of the iceberg, there are more than a dozen universities conducting research into near death experiences and other spiritual experiences. In the coming years more evidence will be available.
From a personal view, I never could believe a handful of cells, called a brain could create something thousands of times greater and more complex than itself such as a human personality. The arguments against it are numerous.
Obviously, I’m late to the party. Mostly commenting on the OP, though I’ve skimmed the rest of the thread. I think the answer is fairly simple. In practice, most placebos are of the homeopathy type. That is, they’re home remedies or distributed by alternative medicine practitioners to patients who understand they’re not receiving allopathic medicine. As Honest Abe is reported to have said, for people who like that sort of thing, it’s just the sort of thing they like. IOW, the ones for whom the placebo works continue with the alternative therapy; those for whom it doesn’t, don’t. No one is lying to anyone and, you know, not a lot of money changes hands. I worry about people who rely exclusively on alternative medicine, but everyone I know who goes in for this sort of thing uses a mix. Frankly, they look at me with pity, that I have such a limited view.
And, an aside. One of the most remarkable things I’ve run into in the past year is this now somewhat old tidbit about placebos, to wit, that a placebo for morphine can trigger the same brain response as the real thing. See, e.g., here. Astonishing, really. Not just magic or subjective report. A mechanism.
I was only quoting back to you some anti-scientific material from the same site. It seems odd that you should reject scientific method on one hand, while insisting there is good scientific evidence on the other. I have tried following up those experiments cited in your link, but so far have only turned up other NDE worship sites promoting them in a similar way. I’ll keep looking.
Of course cells are pretty darn small, so you can hold a great number in a handful. According to this educational site , there are somewhere in the region of 100 billion cells in the human brain. Obviously the human brain didn’t arise magically from nothing - nervous systems have taken millions of years to get to this pinnacle of complexity. If you consider the human brain to be simply a well-developed receiver for the spirit to manifest itself in, what would say the relatively simple nervous systems of the invertebrates which comprise 80%(ish) of animal life are for?