Like your forehead feeling damp.
If Head-On contains enough menthol, it might work by a mechanism by which Ben-Gay might also work. I’ve tried Ben-Gay, and it certainly does something. You feel it on your skin, gently burning. Mentholated ointments feel cool, but still there’s a real effect.
If our nervous systems have odd quirks, like being organized in branches within which some signals can override or mask other signals, burning or cooling ointments might improve the pain of an internal problem that they aren’t directly influencing at all. I’ve heard accupuncture works this way.
Surely, if there were effects like this, they belong in a different category from “placebos”, which are entirely imaginary in their operation.
Note, I’m not making any claims for such effects other than that they would be distinct from purely imaginary ones.
Somebody else would be in a better position to tell you if it’s working?
Yeah. Let’s call those things “distracting our attention,” or “changing the subject.” A different version of it might be to drop a large rock on your foot. Same mechanism as the Ben-Gay, but cheaper.
Philster, thank you – I understand your position now. And thanks for seeking the references as well.
Well, according to the … uh … what’s it called … “gate” theory of pain? Something like that … Ah, yes, here it is, the gate control theory of pain. Anyway, it says the reason rubbing an injury (like when you stub your toe or bang your shin on something) makes it feel better is that the influx of non-painful signals from the injured area overwhelms the painful signals in the spinal cord and thus dampens the pain. I believe this is also how TENS units, which stimulate nerves in order to mask pain, are supposed to work.
Anyway, I think the idea is the same for menthol and Ben-Gay and capsaicin creams and the like. I guess you could call it “distraction,” but if I understand correctly it’s supposed to work on the nerve level rather than the actually on the conscious attention level.
I’m not convinced that’s how Head-On works, though – I think for the non-painful stimulus to swamp the painful signals, it’s supposed to come from the same part of the body, and I don’t think it’s your forehead that hurts in a headache, so maybe having your forehead feel cool and tingly would just be a distraction from the headache. I could be wrong about all this, though. I guess an easy way to check would be to rub some other part of my body the next time I bang my shin or stub my toe and see if it helps as much as rubbing the affected area does (or if it helps at all). Hmmm. Interesting…
like Gate Theory
Do you mean there’s a real healing effect?
Or just that the ointment feels wet / warm / cold?
If our nervous system is independently alive, you could ask it to help. 
But there’s no evidence for this.
There’s no scientific evidence that acupuncture works, so it’s meaningless to say how it works.
Well there aren’t any observed effects.
So you’re left with the fact that e.g. homoepathy exists because people make money out of selling patients water and using the placebo effect to claim that their ‘medicine’ sometimes ‘works’.
Wasn’t there some research showing that if you gave a placebo along with a dose of naloxone, which blocks opiate receptors and prevents endorphins and enkephalins from doing their “natural painkiller” job, the effectiveness of the placebo drops greatly? I could swear I’ve seen something along these lines referenced on the board before.
If that’s true, then maybe the placebo effect itself is similar to the “gate control” type of thing you’re referring to, where it actually stems from physical changes in brain chemistry rather than being entirely imaginary.
(Although I guess then we get into a question of what exactly “entirely imaginary” or “purely psychological” means, since presumably there must be some changes in the brain to accompany any change in your state of mind and emotions. Hmm.)
You got it. Someone else who doesn’t know what you were treated with, just the outcome. If any bias, intentional or not, is removed, then what is left is more likely to be usable data. From the Skeptic’s Dictionary:
Yeah I know what a double-blind study is. But such a study still depends on the subject’s self-assessment of whether he feels better or not.
People here are fond of saying ‘the plural of anecdote is not data’. Conversely, data doesn’t always predict an individual outcome.
In other words, if Head-on made me feel better, there would be only one data point that mattered to me, regardless of what any double-blind study said.
You may be missing the point. If the subject (you) knows what the substance was (Head-On), that may affect his perception of the results. You know what you took, and you know what to expect. Therefore, you get what you expect. Totally worthless as a scientific study.
A double blind study provides a substance sample that neither the experimenter nor the subject knows what it is each time, for multiple trials. Only after the results are tabulated is the code broken to see if all the “good” results were after substance A was taken but not B.
To look at it another way, in a proper study, you don’t know that it was Head-On that you took when you report “I feel better.” So if you feel better, it might not have been because of Head-On, but something else (or random chance).
If, after many trials, those who took (without knowing) substance A also felt better – to a statistically satisfactory value – and those who took something else did not, then substance A is likely to have some useful and desirable properties.
I do understand, I promise.
But the results of a perfectly-executed double-blind study might not be useful to any given person, if the product (for whatever irrational reason) appears (to that person) to work.
Clearly, there is a place in our culture for treatments that can’t be described be scientists, because they make people feel good.
Incidentally, I also think You know what you took, and you know what to expect. Therefore, you get what you expect is a really dim view of human nature. I’ve had many healthcare experiences where I expected one outcome and got another. Same with everyone I’ve ever talked to.
But you know you are using Head-on and you already expect it to work.
Why not ask someone to pass you something that might be Head-on, and might not be?
Then you could see if you felt better consistently with Head-on or whether it was just the placebo effect.
See here for a dowser who is 100% perfect when he knows where the target is and drops to chance when he doesn’t.
This is not a ‘dim view of human nature’, but a scientific fact.
The way we know that a treatment (or a claimed skill) works is that it works even when the subject doesn’t know the medicine is real.
>I think for the non-painful stimulus to swamp the painful signals, it’s supposed to come from the same part of the body, and I don’t think it’s your forehead that hurts in a headache…
This depends on how close you need to be to the “same part”. But the only way I’ve used Ben-Gay is to rub it on the outside of the sore joint, if you catch my meaning.
>Do you mean there’s a real healing effect? Or just that the ointment feels wet / warm / cold?
I don’t mean either. I mean there’s no real healing effect, no effect on the body part in question. But, I suggest there could be a real effect of eliminating or reducing pain felt in the body part, because of an oddity in the way the nervous system works. The ointment also feels wet/warm/cold, but I suggest that isn’t its only consequence.
I think “gate theory” is the nervous system oddity I remembered hearing about.
By “oddity” I mean that our simple mental picture of the nervous system as being numerous sensors, each with its own dedicated wire leading to the brain, is wrong. Suppose instead the nervous system has ways of using fewer wires, and doing some kind of switching at various places in a way that you can still usually tell what the sensors are sensing. Then, suppose that when you create a mild buring sensation in many skin sensors around your knee, the switching mechanism isn’t good enough to convey those sensations and still maintain the aching sensations coming from inside your knee. Maybe there’s some simple numerical voting. Or maybe whichever sensation is newer gets serviced more thoroughly by the switching system (after all, maybe Ben-Gay would be worthless if you put it on some time before you hurt your knee).
Well, which makes more sense to take: a product that has been shown to be effective whether you believe in it or not, or a product that only works if you want it to?
Dim, perhaps, but realistic. It’s what makes us human, and it’s the bane of science. Devising tests to get a valid and unambiguous answer is what science is all about. It’s what separates us from our ancestors, who relied on guesses, the witch doctor or clergy for their medical information.
Now, we’re back to chiropractic, again. 
Wrong. As usual with Randi’s tests that is a distortion.
In fact Randi threatens all his test subjects with instant disqualification if they don’t say what he tells them to say.
so, he puts the gold in cup no 2, and orders the subject to show a reaction from cup no 2. Failure to do so will result in being dismissed. Repeat 20 times, with 100% success being mandatory. 95% success is not good enough. Get it right 19 times in a row, fail on the 20th, get disqualified.
In fact, it would be more accurate to say that the subject got 100% when Randi was telling him what to say.
I wish you could understand how unreliable Randi’s information is. He lies and cheats constantly. Everything is a distortion. As a result of his lies, you have been given a misleading impression of how dowsers think. And that only damages discussions like this one.
No, it’s not a fact. Most people, even dowsers, just don’t think that way. Very few have ever agreed to go along with this. The few that did so were bullied into it, it is not a reflection of their actual beliefs.
Peter Morris, trying once again to fight ignorance.