229: The Placebo Effect: How Suggestible Are You?
Age Less / Live More
Lucas Rockwood
4.8 • 1.1K Ratings
🗓️ 17 November 2016
⏱️ 59 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Have you heard of sham surgeries? In 2002, 180 people with osteoarthritis of the knee joined a double-blind study. Some patients underwent real arthroscopic surgery and a placebo group simply had a skin incision and then were stitched back up. Here is where it gets weird. The placebo group self-reported identical results to those who had undergone actual surgery.
This is just one example of thousands of documented instances of "mind over body" in healing modalities ranging from allopathic medicine and crystal therapy to group prayer and homeopathy. How can this be? On this week's Yoga Talk Show, we'll try to get to the bottom of this very real phenomenon.
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What You´ll Learn:
- Why the scientific method has always been hindered by the placebo effect as it taints nearly every data set—it's omnipresent
- How crystals, prayer healing, Reiki, and fridge modalities can sometimes deliver amazing results
- Why certain conditions that respond better to placebos (ex: pain, skin conditions, Parkinson's, depression, anxiety)
- How shame surgeries can be just as effective as real surgeries
- Why hypnosis and placebo are not necessarily connected
Links & Resources:
ABOUT OUR GUEST
Erik Vance is a native Bay Area writer living in Mexico. In his earlier life, he was a biologist, a rock climbing guide, an environmental consultant, and an environmental educator.
His work focuses on the human element of science – the people who do it, those who benefit from it, and those who do not. He has written for The New York Times, Nature, Scientific American, Harper's, National Geographic, and a number of other local and national outlets.
His first book, Suggestible You, about how the mind and body continually twist and shape our realities was inspired by his feature in Discover and is on Amazon. You can learn more about his work at www.ErikVance.com
Nutritional Tip:
- Cooking with Olive Oil
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | I've known about essential oils for many years and we've certainly had guests on the |
| 0:04.0 | yoga talk show to talk about the benefits of essential oils, but it's just in the past year that I started |
| 0:08.7 | using them more deliberately and more consciously. And one of my favorites is Mandarin and the reason I like it either an orange or |
| 0:15.2 | a Mandarin is both of them are very relaxing so I'll use it in my bedroom to |
| 0:19.6 | set the stage for hopefully what's gonna be a a good night sleep. I always struggle with that. |
| 0:23.6 | And I use it in my office, usually towards the end of the day, to help me wind down because I get so |
| 0:28.4 | wound up with stress. Other favorites of mine for different times of the day are Rosemary which just has kind of an amazing smell and lemon grass which again kind of takes me back to my time in Thailand and here's how do it. I used to always have those candle |
| 0:44.0 | burners, candle incense burners. So you know you have a little bit of water. It's like a |
| 0:48.2 | pulpery thing. You have this tea candle underneath and the problem with that is |
| 0:51.9 | it makes a big mess and especially in the |
| 0:53.4 | studios for liability and just for trying not to burn the house down it was a |
| 0:57.7 | really bad idea so we developed this beautiful essential oil mister it's a diffuser you put some water and you put a couple drops of essential oil and the thing will go for anywhere from three to seven hours |
| 1:09.7 | Making your room smell amazing and if you're using great oils and you're doing it |
| 1:13.6 | deliberately like Mandarin oil right before bed you'll notice some really really nice |
| 1:18.1 | mood effects it's kind of cool to be able to affect your mood when you need to. The reason this is different |
| 1:24.2 | than other diffusers you'll find on the market is most of the stuff on the market |
| 1:27.9 | looks like a funkadelic 1970s lava lamp. This does not and most of the stuff on the market breaks after about a month. |
| 1:34.4 | I know because I've gone through tons of these. |
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| 1:40.7 | wood exterior, so it looks great, whether it's in the bathroom or the |
| 1:43.7 | kitchen or anywhere else so if you'd like to pick up a holiday gift or just one or two for |
| 1:49.3 | yourself go to essential mister com it's www |
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