The Placebo Effect

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The Placebo Effect

    Sanford Baran:  It's terrific to be together in one place this morning, each of us bringing the richness of our own unique expressions, in harmony with the Grand Design.

    Interestingly enough, as hard as I did try, my talk this morning simply would not come together. Mind you, I do have some starting ideas, but for whatever reason, these starting points have not quite gelled into a finished, cohesive talk. The remarkable thing is that I'm perfectly okay with this. Instead of being embarrassed by what might seem to be a lack of preparation, I am perfectly comfortable to allow Spirit to have its way in whatever direction it takes us for the remainder of the hour. Obviously, those of you on the line have a special opportunity in helping to shape what develops. So as I say, I do have some starting points (I believe they are interesting starting points) related to the field of technology both man-made and Divine, which hopefully will provide seeds for our shared consideration this hour. My plan is to wrap my portion up quickly to make space for those of you who feel compelled to flesh out more fully what I hope will be some creative and collaborative dialog.

    I've had opportunity over the last couple of months to participate in a very interesting educational experiment. There's a popular Computer Science class taught at Stanford University entitled "Introduction to Artificial Intelligence." As you would expect, you would need to be enrolled at Stanford to be able to take this course-that is, until this current semester. It turns out that the two professors teaching the course, decided to create an on-line version, essentially opening it up, free of charge, to anyone in the world who was interested in taking it. All that was required was a computer and a connection to the Internet.

    Sometime last August, word about this on-line course had gotten out and in no time had gone viral. By then 58,000 people worldwide had already enrolled! Well I certainly wasn't going to be left out, so I signed up immediately. By the time the course began in early October there were some 160,000 people in the class.

    So it's now December and the class is almost over; the final exam is in two weeks. What a fun and fantastic experience it has been-as close to being there as you could imagine. How interesting to be part of this worldwide experiment, sharing this new learning paradigm not only with the professors, but also with the tens of thousands of fellow students around the globe. I was amazed at what can be achieved at a distance.

    I might say a word about the curriculum itself. The field of Artificial Intelligence is all about making so-called "intelligent" machines, especially involving computer algorithms. One interesting example that we studied, were cars that can drive themselves in traffic. Granted, this might sound ridiculous; however, if you consider how many humanly caused traffic fatalities there are per year, the notion of self-driving cars, if executed well could save thousands of lives. Self-driving cars, after all, never drive while intoxicated!

    We can observe that many man-made technologies do serve useful purposes, although often their implementations can be unwieldy and ultimately impractical. For example, we marvel at how powerful and compact computers have become. And yet the upper physical limits of conventional computer designs are rapidly being approached. Today's chips are basically power hogs, running hot, very hot, which curbs how many nano-scale circuits can ultimately be shrunk onto a piece of silicon. You might recall all of the hoopla surrounding Watson, the question-answering IBM computer that plays "Jeopardy" and beat two human champions earlier this year. Well, IBM's clever machine consumes 85,000 watts of electricity. Contrast that with the human brain that only needs 20! So we can observe that Divine Technology is not only ingenious, but is elegantly efficient. Science, it turns out, is paying attention. Quoting John E. Kelly, the Director of Research at IBM, "Every time we look at this, biology provides a clue as to how we should pursue the frontiers of computing." Time and again, advances in human technology occur on the basis of mimicking what already exists and works so well within the realm of Divine technology.

    Next, I wanted to bring to your attention a fascinating article that appeared in this week's issue of The New Yorker magazine. The article is entitled, "The Power of Nothing" and describes in some detail what is called the Placebo Effect, which is now being actively researched at Harvard University in its newly created "Program in Placebo Studies and Therapeutic Encounter."

    Just to review, a placebo is a simulated treatment for a disease, and is intended to deceive the recipient into thinking that it in fact is a real treatment. However, sometimes patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition-a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect. The program at Harvard was formed to explore an idea that even twenty years ago would have seemed preposterous: that placebos given deliberately, might be deployed in clinical practice as medicine. Certainly one advantage if they were indeed effective is that they wouldn't have any of the side effects that pharmaceuticals typically have. So as further food for thought, I wanted to read to you a number of interesting excerpts from the article.

    "Simply believing in treatment can be as effective as the treatment itself."

    "Some people respond even to the suggestion of treatment."

    "In several recent studies, placebos have performed as well as drugs that Americans spend millions of dollars on each year."

    "Our expectations can have a profound impact on how we heal."

    "Emotions and expectations can affect our perception of pain."

    I'm sure some of these statements don't sound all that radical. Here's a paragraph I'd like to read:

    "Slowly, over the past decade, researchers have begun to tease out the strands of the placebo response. The findings, while difficult to translate into medicine, have been compelling. In most cases, the larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand name pills trump generics. Capsules are generally more effective than pills, and injections produce a more pronounced effect than either. There is even evidence to suggest that the color of medicine influences the way one responds to it: colored pills are more likely to relieve pain than white pills; blue pills help people sleep better than red pills; and green capsules are the best bet when it comes to anxiety medication."

    Here's another interesting finding: "The placebo effect doesn't appear to work with Alzheimer's patients. This is because most people who have Alzheimer's disease are unable to anticipate the future and are therefore unable to prepare for it."

    The article goes on to address this notion of the ritual of healing. One of the main characters in the article is a man named Ted Kaptchuk, an American acupuncturist who received his training in Bejing some thirty years ago. He is the first "Director of the Program in Placebo Studies" and is one of the few prominent professors at Harvard Medical School with neither a medical degree nor a doctorate. Now despite the popularity of acupuncture, clinical studies continually fail to demonstrate its effectiveness-a fact that Kaptchuk doesn't dispute. The author asks him how a person like him who talks about the primacy of data and disdains what he calls the "squishiness" of alternative medicine, could rely so heavily on a therapy with no proven value. When asked this, Kaptchuk smiled broadly. "Because I am a damn good healer," he said. "That is the difficult truth. If you needed help and you came to me, you would get better. Thousands of people have. Because, in the end, it isn't really about the needles. It's about the man."

    He continues on with statements like, "We need to stop pretending it's all about molecular biology. Serious illnesses are affected by aesthetics, by art, and by the moral questions that are negotiated between practitioners and patients. For many people a placebo is just a sugar pill. For others, the definition includes the entire ritual of treatment, the complete interaction of doctor and patient."

    One final thought I had: this is yet another example of feng shui, the art of bringing to focus the creative relationships between forms-in this case, between one who is in need of healing, with another who is in position to offer it.

    These are my starting points and as you can see there is quite a bit of room to move this consideration forward. So if you feel that you would like to add to the story, and further flesh out our shared dialog together, the lines are open.

    (A number of participants offered comments, expanding the opening lines of thought. The following excerpts capture the Spirit of the shared dialog that ensued.)

    Jody Isaacs:   I appreciate this opportunity to walk in Divine thinking all together this morning and it is about "the man" or "the woman"-Divine Being. What comes to mind right now is: the Truth is always true, and it doesn't matter what technology we put on it or experiment with in our human experience….I think these are days of true celebration, and I'm so glad that we have this time to be fluid together this morning.

    Meta Prather:   …we all know the phrase "the things I fear will come upon me." A person who fears something usually ends up having some results of that fear. The people that take placebos probably are thinking, "The thing I can love, the thing that is the Truth, will free me of what I have feared"-such as a disease…The bottom line would be that: "The drugs aren't necessary if I give my energy to the Truth." That is what is necessary; that will cure. We are so blessed, and we've been blessed truly this morning with how you have proceeded with this time that we have all together of blessing the Truth.

    Tessa Maskell:   (After describing medical doctors at the University of Texas who said that homeopathic potions were just a Placebo Effect, but then realized that it did work in the treatment of breast cancer.) …I'm interested by the relationship between me and the homeopath. Maybe dinky little white pills are just a means of connection.

    Jim Wellemeyer:   …What is it we actually believe in? I realize we sometimes say we need to get beyond belief, but in the context of what we are saying this morning, it appears that belief has quite a strong influence. I recall that Our Master, Jesus, on several occasions spoke of belief making one whole: "…thy faith hath made thee whole…" and He also said, "….I say unto you, he that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also; and greater works than these shall he do…" It does relate to our centering. Tessa mentioned the homeopathic doctor and herself. That is a clue of our centering in the One I love and allows us to manifest things greater than we'd ever perceived in our lives. So I really thank you for our time this morning, very informative and healing.

    Barry Manderson:   …Sitting here listening to you this morning and the others, what occurred to me was that it's all about response. Regardless of what kind of a process we might be involved in or might be outworking, as someone mentioned, the Design works and where is my response? Being multidimensional Beings, there are multidimensional ways in which response happens. In this context we might say part of it all has to do with the different levels of fine substance that I generate and carry in my world. It might mean taking a sledgehammer and a wrench to fix disease, or it might be a homeopathic concoction, or it might be a simple word and the enthusiasm of agreement that brings about healing or brings about creation.

    Kate Parrot:   …I wanted to pick up on the themes that others brought up too around agreement-and also about the place of not only agreement with others in bringing forth healing and creative expression, but also our agreement with and centeredness in life-in the One that I Am. To a large degree the technology we have in the world expresses the fact that we, for the most part, are not centered in that Truth and reality of life…We're sort of like newly born fawns blinking in the bright light right now, coming to a sense of awareness of what is possible when we are in actual agreement with one another and with our own True Identities. There are lots of examples of things that are coming on line like the things that you brought to our attention today. As Jody was saying just a few minutes ago, what is true will always be true. We were kind of amazed when we look around and see things like Placebo Effects where something works in a context; we're not used to thinking of it as working, because our paradigm of separateness doesn't allow it. So I think that we're on the precipice of an incredibly exciting moment in time. What we are able to manifest going forward is beyond anything we can imagine, so thank you for opening up this exciting area for exploration.

    (Sanford following comments: )  Thank you Kate, and thank you everyone for helping to flesh out the story through our collaboration and agreement. It's absolutely refreshing to have participated in this collective expression of Spirit. In a way this was quite a relief for me, as the designated speaker, to realize that I didn't have to pull the whole thing off single-handedly. The very fact of our aligned expression was what has made this time together spiritually useful, and fun as well.

    We are in fact all connected, and through our agreement and harmonization with the Grand Design we can begin to really see what is possible. I find this all quite exciting.