"In a new report that is being met with a mixture of astonishment and sometimes disbelief, two Danish researchers say the placebo effect is a myth."

Well, that's a mighty bold statement. This is on the front page, mind you. Wow. The placebo effect is a myth? Quite a lead. I wonder how they determined this with such finality? Let's read on...

"The investigators analyzed 114 published studies involving about 7,500 patients with 40 different conditions. The report found no support for the common notion that, in general, about a third of patients will improve if they are given a dummy pill and told it is real."

They found no support? None? 7,500 patients? 40 conditions? Wow. Ok, so that's that, right? The placebo is dead; long live the placebo, yes?

"Instead, the researchers theorize, patients seem to improve after taking placebos because most diseases have uneven courses in which their severity waxes and wanes."

Beg pardon? We went from "no support" to "the researchers theorize" that patients "seem to improve" because disease symptoms come and go. That's a remarkably vague conclusion, don't you think? How do you suppose they track the "waxing and waning" of diseases? Through disease ennui?

See, it's all in the wording and although it's true that the Times is summarizing the findings, remember that this is front page news. That is the most expensive and most important "real estate" in the whole paper, so you can damn well bet the whole farm and the mad cows that what you are reading has been carefully and maticulously scrutinized for both scientific accuracy and informational agenda. In other words, all the news that's fit to print.

So at this point, let's ask a few more questions; something they hope you aren't going to do. Such as, how did the resarchers get away with stating that there is no support for the placebo effect based upon a theory about the uncertainty they have of disease regression rates? Disease regression rates are not a known or understood concept either and further argue the case for self-healing. After all, if my disease "regresses" that's the equivalent of stating my body is healing, so self-healing (the placebo effect) is not supportable based upon a theory they have about self-healing (disease regression rates)?

But, most importantly, how does this negate the placebo effect and turn it into a myth? Why isn't the regression factor of a disease considered as part of the body's innate ability to heal itself? Because Western medicine can not allow for the possibility that the body can heal itself. That's why. If we can all heal ourselves, then the entire concept behind Western medicine is wrong. Not just incorrect, but WRONG.

Western medicine is predicated on the absolute belief that a human body is identical to a car. Not just analogous, as we have oft times proclaimed, but IDENTICAL. This means that parts is parts and anything screwing up the functioning of the car is an "external" force of some nature; a virus; a blocked ventricle stopping blood flow; a non-functioning gland here or there; a known quantity working in a known manner following known procedures.

This is the thinking of the Western voodoo. I cut in order to heal, kind of logic. So, naturally, it is imperative and presupposed that there can be no healing beside the healing inflicted by Western medicine. Destroy the placebo effect or no feng shui waiting room.

But here's where the worm turns and the Times exposes itself for the corporate pharmaceutical shill that it really is:

"In studies in which treatments are compared not just with placebos but also with no treatment at all, they said, participants given no treatment improve at about the same rate as participants given placebos."

So much for the myth!

It's very important to deconstruct this sentence as here is where it is all carefully hidden from the discerning reader/citizen. This is the cookie that gives away the fat kid smacking its fat kid lips while you turned your head for just a moment to look at that chick in the red skirt.

Read the sentence again and understand that this is the methodology and conclusion of the researchers' analysis; the conclusion that is then misconstrued and re-interpreted by the Times in their lead paragraph where they stated the placebo effect is a myth.

What they have done is compared the placebo percentages reported in clinical studies (30 to 35%, or 1/3 recovery) with participants given no treatment at all and found the percentages to be equivalent! Not that the placebo effect is a "myth," rather that the recovery rate for patients given placebos was EQUAL to patients given nothing at all.

IN OTHER BIG FAT WORDS, SELF-HEALING ACCOUNTED FOR 60 TO 70%, OR 2/3 RECOVERY OVER "ACTIVE" DRUGS, PROVING THAT THE BODY'S ABILITY TO HEAL ITSELF IS VASTLY SUPERIOR TO THAT OF WESTERN MEDICINE'S CONCEPT OF CARPET-BOMBING THE BODY WITH MAN-MADE SIDE-EFFECT TOXINS!

But is this astonishing discovery pointed out at all by either the "researchers" or the Times reporter who has been granted cherished front page real estate for such a remarkable breakthrough in understanding human existence? No. Instead a giant black hole of silence sucks in all vestiges of connectivity through the implication that patients given no treatment at all couldn't possibly have healed themselves in the same way that the placebo effect allegedly works, therefore the whole thing is a wash every single time it comes up.

Notice also that they aren't refuting the fact that it does come up, they're just implying that because placebos equal no treatment at all, that it's all just "waxing and waning" instead of the outlandish and ridiculous notion that the human body has the natural ability to heal and this ability can be consciously triggered. "Waxing and waning" makes a + b + c = d sense so that's what must be happening here.

"The paper appears today in The New England Journal of Medicine. Both authors, Dr. Asbjorn Hrobjartsson and Dr. Peter C. Gotzsche, are with the University of Copenhagen and the Nordic Cochran Center, an international organization of medical researchers who review randomized clinical trials. Dr. Hrobjartsson said he had been telling other investigators what he found and watching their responses. "People react with surprise, but also with a kind of satisfaction," he said in a telephone interview. "They start reflecting."

Do they now? Satisfaction as in, "I knew only I had the ability to heal?" Reflecting as in, "Now I can finally get the new Mercedes?"

"Experts interviewed this week had a range of responses from ready acceptance of the conclusion to great surprise to a skepticism and the desire to see the details of the analysis.

Dr. Donald Berry, for example, a statistician at the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, said: "I believe it. In fact, I have long believed that the placebo effect is nothing more than a regression effect," referring to a well- known statistical observation that a patient who feels particularly terrible one day will almost invariably feel better the next day, no matter what is done for him.

I don't know, maybe we're slow, but do any of you see anything that mentions the fact that self-healing is now accountable for 2/3's recovery here? No? In fact, all we can see is the word "conclusion" used yet again to bolster the bias that this piece proves there is no placebo effect and therefore, no such thing as self-healing, when just the opposite is being discussed.

"Another physician, Dr. Jonathan Moreno, director of the Center for the Biomedical Ethics at the University of Virginia, said it rang true to him. 'Maybe it is one of the urban legends of medicine,' he said."

WHAT? "Maybe"? "Urban legends?" This is a well documented effect from hundreds of disparate sources throughout all of Western medicine's ignoble history! And look at the quotes the Times article is using as being supportable evidence! How does "Maybe" become "Conclusion?" Implication, baby, pure and simple and false implication to boot!

But surely there is something in this entire article to suggest the real conclusion that is so blatantly obvious it hurts. Surely one doctor out there has the intelligence and the courage to come forward and explain to the ignorant peons that the Times and the Danes are miscontruing this whole thing into something it clearly is not. Surely!

Let's see...

"But others, like David Freedman, a statistician at the University of California, said he was not convinced." Professor Freedman said the statistical method the Danish researchers used, pooling data from many studies and using a statistical tool called metanalysis to examine them, could give misleading results.

Ahh, finally, a dissenting opinion. But, wait, "could" give misleading results? What's "metanalysis?" "Misleading" or incorrect? All necessary questions that must be answered in order for us to determine the validity of this evidence. Are they?

"I just don't find this report to be incredibly persuasive," he said. "The evidence of a placebo effect is maybe a little bit less than I thought it was, but I think there's a big effect in many circumstances. This doesn't change my mind."

Well, good, we're all glad that a statistician's mind hasn't been changed, but what about the facts and the "conclusion" and the use of "metanalysis?" We don't give a shit what you think, what can you prove? Facts, damn you, facts!

Keep in mind that this is the only contradictory opinion offered in the whole piece and at this point, you would find his opinion on page A22 deep inside the newspaper and nowhere near the front page lead.

Now let's see how this singular contradictory opinion was dismissed in the next sentence:

"The researchers said they saw a slight effect of placebos on subjective outcomes reported by patients, like their descriptions of how much pain they experienced. But, Dr. Hrobjartsson said, he questions that effect."

So the only contradiction to the researchers' "conclusions" comes from a statistician's inability to fully understand what goes on with placebos. There is a "slight effect," certainly, but even this is "questioned" by the research team, so disregard the uninformed opinions of some desk clerk who just couldn't possibly understand the intricacies as we do and in so doing disregard ALL contradictory opinions as nothing more than the uninformed layperson's armchair theories. WE are the music makers and we are the dreamers of the dreams.

"It could be a true effect, but it also could be a reporting bias," he said. "The patient wants to please the investigator and tells the investigator, `I feel slightly better.'"

Oh, well then, naturally we're all completely wrong and the whole thing about the body being able to heal itself without the horrendously invasive arrogance of Western medicine is all just our childish misunderstanding. We just want to please our doctors, that's why cancers dissappear as if "miraculously" and patients given a month to live outlive their doctors. It's just all our Oppie in Mayberry syndrome! You know me? Down with Oppie and Bee in Mayberry?

How fucking dare they? "I feel slightly better?" The whole concept of self-healing is marginallized by flippant speculation that no one at the Times seems to realize works BOTH ways. Don't forget that "active" drugs only work 1/3 of the time, too. Don't patients who took the "active" drugs also want to please their doctors? Don't they also feel "slightly" better one day and then regress the next? Why aren't these questions being asked?

This is why. Note the choice wording in this next sentence:

"Placebos are still needed in clinical research, Dr. Hrobjartsson said, to prevent researchers from knowing who is getting a real treatment. Otherwise, he said, researchers can end up seeing what they want to see. For example, they may notice changes in patients who are taking an active drug while not paying as much attention to similar symptoms in patients that they know are being left untreated. Patients, he said, who are told they are not being treated may leave the study, further complicating research efforts."

We're just all a bunch of fucking morons screwing up their tests and halting production of their tiny little toxin release pills! And did you notice the first sentence yet again making a conclusion about placebos in a dismissive and clearly unscientific manner; as if the entire concept of self-healing is just too laughable for any doctor to stomache before the market closes? They are still needed to prevent researchers from knowing who is getting the "real" treatment. Do you see the words chosen? Self-healing isn't considered "real" treatment, aparently. Amazing, isn't it? The shear blind, stupid arrogance of it. Rampant egocentrism deliberately discrediting the individual as having anything at all to do with the healing process! Just astounding.

Think about how the body works as opposed to the way popping a pill works, for example. A body is, in essence, a carefully regulated information flow device, which processes anything placed into its system. Nutrients, calories, carbohydrates, etc., processed from our daily intake of foods and designated for special delivery by the bloodstream. Specific "information" is sent to specific locations for further processing and use by those specific locations. Muscles burn sugars; the liver processes toxins; the bladder processes waste; etc.

Every thing has a place and every thing in its place and all of it working its way through the body according to a very deliberate "hunt and peck" series of checks and balances. What the body requires is culled from the natural processes of extraction, routing, storage and use.

Now imagine introducing a synthetic, concentrated time-released explosion of one very specific drug that is only supposed to work on one very specific bodily "malfunction" yet is deposited nowhere near that very specific bodily malfunction. Blast the shit out of the entire body and flood every crevice with the drug in the ridiculous hope that the tiny, specific area in trouble gets what it needs.

This is the medical equivalent of dropping an atomic bomb in order to kill one bad guy. The result is what our military euphemistically calls, "colateral damage."

Pharmaceutical companies call it "side effects."

Now we peel back the onion...

"Dr. Hrobjartsson and Dr. Gotzsche said they began their study out of curiosity. Over and over, medical journals and textbooks asserted that placebo effects were so powerful that, on average, 35 percent of patients would improve simply if they were told that a dummy treatment was real. The investigators began asking where this assessment came from. Every paper, Dr. Hrobjartsson said, seemed to refer to other papers. And those papers referred him to other papers. He began peeling back the onion, finally coming to the original paper. It was written by a Boston doctor, Henry Beecher, who had been chief of anesthesiology at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and in 1955 published a paper, "The Powerful Placebo" in The Journal of the American Medical Association.

In his paper, Dr. Beecher, who died in 1976, reviewed about a dozen studies that compared placebos with active treatments and concluded that placebos had medical effects. "He came up with the magical 35 percent number that has entered placebo mythology," Dr. Hrobjartsson said.

Well, that's pretty damn amazing! The whole thing was based on just one paper written in 1955? Is this true? Who knows, but that's what they're stating here and this is the New York Fuckin' Times, so it must be true, right? Note also the marginallization of the "magical" number that has entered "placebo mythology."

Neither of the researchers question Dr. Beecher's conclusion, by the way, they simply dismiss it with carefully chosen words designed to imply it's all just a bunch of hooey.

Now look at what "evidence" they do provide in order to contradict Dr. Beecher's perfectly legitimate and never refuted "magical" 35% recovery rate attributed to a sugar pill:

"But, Dr. Hrobjartsson said, diseases naturally wax and wane. And no matter how sick the person is, a truly bad spell will almost inevitably be followed by a period in which the condition seems to improve. What if the natural variation in a disease's course is behind the placebo effect, they asked?"

And what if it isn't? Why not ask the same thing of the "active" drugs? What's the agenda here, healing somebody or making billions on all of the miracle toxins Pfizer spews out its corporate, publicly traded ass? We think you know what we think.

"Of the many articles I looked through, no article distinguished between a placebo effect and the natural course of a disease," Dr. Hrobjartsson said. "This is a very banal error to make, but sometimes banal errors are made."

What "many articles" would this be? I thought there was an onion peeled back to reveal only one article by Dr. Beecher back in the fifties? They're not even attmepting to hide they're agenda. And by "they" we mean "THEY."

Big points for using the word "banal," however. It means nothing in context with what they're talking about, but certainly sounds important.

After all, why in the world would anybody look for the "natural course of the disease" as a reason to discount self-healing? Doesn't the "natural course of the disease" include healing or do these medieval butchers simply have the fatalism one would associate with most necropheliacs?

Not to mention (though you know we will) that every case is unique. Only an idiot would generalize and form concrete diagnoses based upon a generalized model. But then, we're obviously not as smart as most doctors, so the idea of comparing apples and oranges simply because they are both "fruit" must make perfect sense to them when treating one of the most complicated organic systems we know of.

Did you notice, also that they are penalizing other studies (for which there is only supposed to be one core study, remember) for not applying their theory to begin with?

Let's see where this takes our Rosencrantz and Guildenstern.

"He and Dr. Gotzsche began looking for well-conducted studies that divided patients into three groups, giving one a real medical treatment, one a placebo and one nothing at all. That was the only way, they reasoned, to decide whether placebos had any medical effect.

You mean, beside conducting their own experiment so there would be no doubt as to the control issues and parameters? Reading other studies and examining their faulty methodology and/or possibly invalid conclusions was the "only way" to decide whether placebos had any medical effect? WHAT?

"But they worried that there might be so few such studies with a treated, untreated and placebo group that they would never be able to answer the question. "We thought if we could find 20, that would be a huge success," Dr. Hrobjartsson said. To their surprise, they found 114, published between 1946 and 1998. The conditions included from medical disorders, like high blood pressure, high cholesterol levels and asthma; behavioral disorders and addictions, like alcohol abuse and smoking; neurological diseases like Alzheimer's disease, Parkinson's disease, and epilepsy, and infections, like bacterial infections and the common cold."

Well, wait a second, here. Most of these "disorders" are not exactly what we would immediately think of for illustrations of the placebo effect either pro or con, would you? Alcohol abuse? Epilepsy? Smoking?

Remember, the placebo effect is supposedly predicated on the notion that a patient's belief in the knowledge and healing powers of the drugs and the doctors prescribing those drugs is what heals them; mind over matter, but not just random thoughts. It is supposedly a result of the focused belief in the ability of our doctors to heal us as well as the focused desire of the patient to be healed. We don't know about you, but we smoke and drink, so the mind over matter qualities here are a tad outside the parameters we'd search for when attempting to figure out the validity (or invalidity) of the self's desire and ability to heal itself, but that's just us. We like smoking and drinking and we don't have the billions of pharmaceutical dollars per annum agenda so we wouldn't investigate self-inflicted disorders as the most readily accessible illustration of self-healing, but hey, that's just us.

It's not just a simple "a + b + c = d" process, so you can't necessarily apply Western concepts to what is better analyzed through Eastern schools of thought. Wouldn't it be reasonable to assume that the mind's ability to heal would be relative on basic levels, much like a child first learning how to write a sentence? Isn't it reasonable to assume that a strong belief in the curative powers of say, aspirin to cure a headache would be a relatively simple and base level study to conduct in order to test the placebo effect, as opposed to investigating the self-healing statistics of somebody else's study on Alzheimers? A study, by the way, that was not focusing on the concept of self-healing?

We know the argument; it's the argument from extremes. "Hey, if a placebo can cure a headache, then it can cure a brain tumor, too, right? RIGHT, genius?" Well, yes, theoretically, but wouldn't it be logical to assume that mind over matter focus would also involve an uphill battle; a constant state of focus and non-focus? Just as thinking something can cure you, thinking something can kill you would first have to be dealt with, too, don't you think? Positive thoughts would be working against negative thoughts, such as, oh we don't know, "the placebo effect is a MYTH and you cannot heal yourself so don't even try," kind of thing.

But let's play fair here. After all, they are trying to analyze this phenomenon (that was not supposed to exist in any other onion but Dr. Beecher's, remember) as clinically as possible and these were the studies they found.

Of course, their search criteria and dilligence was not reported and they could have simply done as we suggest, which is to set up a clinical study of their own using something more simple, such as an aspirin to remove a headache, rather than the ability of the mind to cure epilepsy, but, again let's let that slide, too.

So, keeping in mind that they are looking through Western colored glasses, what did they find in these 114 studies where placebos, nothing and "active" drugs were used?

"When they analyzed the data, they could detect no effects of placebos on objective measurements, like cholesterol levels or blood pressure."

Oh. Ok. Is that it? Did we miss something?

Did they detect effects on the disease itself? In relation to which disorders? Just patients with high cholesterol levels and those with high or low blood pressure? Why would there be an effect on cholesterol levels or blood pressure or other "objective" measurements if we're discussing the notion that the mind is capable of circumventing the "auto-pilot" bodily functions simply by thinking about healing? Are they seriously using the term "objective" as in a universally applied truth, because if that's the case, no such thing exists?

Such measurements are only side effects to the disorders based on an "a + b + c = d" model, for which the placebo effect (self-healing) does not apply.

For example, if you take a placebo for a headache and your headache goes away, but your blood pressure remains the same, what possible difference would that make to your headache going away? Wouldn't the mind over matter concept mean that you have circumvented "c" (constricted blood flow to the brain causing pain) in order to quantum leap to "d" (pain removed; headache gone). One might expect your blood pressure to change based on Western presuppositions that the body is a predictable and consistent "objective" mass of verifiable cause and effect reactions, but that just ain't the way it works, folks!

We know from quantum physics that our bodies are more akin to a glowing fog of atoms existing in an infinite state of possibility until observed, so that right there would tend to blow the theory into a different track, yes?

But back on topic, just because your blood pressure doesn't change, does that necessarily mean that your headache did not get "healed?" How do you draw the conclusion that "objective" measurements do not reflect "subjective" changes in the body's natural ability to heal itself, or in the theory that a thought is capable of healing? Why define healed as non-constricted blood vessel instead of pain alleviated?

In short, how does examining a spark plug explain why the driver turned left?

We certainly don't see anything remotely addressing these issues here. Do you? Or do you think they're trying to tell us that our bodies can't heal themselves? What do you think?

"Dr. John C. Bailar III, an emeritus professor at the University of Chicago who wrote an editorial accompanying the placebo paper, said the findings called into question some mind-body beliefs. These are arguments that use the placebo effect to conclude that the mind can so profoundly affect the course of a disease that people should be able to harness this power and think themselves well."

Now do you see what we're talking about? Suddenly they cut from a vague conclusion that could only be useful in speculations, to a doctor emeritus proclaiming that "some" mind-body beliefs are now in question. As if they weren't already in question to begin with and as if this paper somehow provides answers to those questions, when in fact it only serves to offer up even more questions!

So far, all this piece has done is confuse the issue even further and obfuscate the simple fact that Western medicine can't explain how the human body heals itself. Indeed, this implies that the human body can't heal itself like previously thought, which in turn fucks up the whole point of the placebo effect, which is WHAT PEOPLE THINK AND WHY THEY THINK IT! If you think there is no placebo effect, then there isn't. That's the whole point of the placebo effect.

Are we the only people that get this?

"The findings should also give doctors pause in prescribing treatments they know are useless, like a glass of warm milk at bedtime for patients with insomnia or futile drugs for patients in the late stages of fatal diseases, Dr. Bailar said.

Well, fuck us slowly with a fork. How did we get from a speculative theory about the "waxing and waning" of disease regression patterns in relation to the theory of the placebo effect to doctors prescribing treatments they "know" to be useless? Where was the documentation that states a glass of warm milk at bedtime is "useless" for insomniacs? What is "futile" about prescribing ANYTHING AT ALL for patients in the late stages of fatal diseases?

Again, the placebo effect is based largely upon a patient's belief that doctors KNOW. So why are they doing this? What benefit is there to the patient to destroy the notion that the body can heal itself? And what effect do you think this article would have on patients currently rotting in hospital beds in desperate search for a cure no matter how fucking futile some arrogant prick of a Danish doctor thinks it is? How the fuck would they know?

And that's the point. They don't know. And since their entire livelihood is based upon the lie that they do know, they come up with this speculative, non-study that implies that their conclusions are correct. That's forgivable to a certain degree, but it is NOT forgivable for the New York Times to word the article the way they did and place the article where they placed it. There is only one correct conclusion to be drawn from those actions and we think you already know what it is.

"I think what this ought to do is bring about a very sharp reduction in the use of placebos," he said. "My guess is that it will bring about a modest reduction and that it will take a second or third penetrating paper to bring about a real change."

So, there you go folks. It's already been determined from this speculative, convoluted and grossly biased theory that placebos should be tossed out and no patient should ever be encouraged to heal themselves. What a shock. Hundreds of billions of dollars can't sway the integrity of these doctors, oh no. No more warm glasses of milk for dying patients, either. That doesn't cost nearly enough money.

Fuckers.

Not to mention the fact that who are all these doctors walking around prescribing placebos? And if they've worked before, why won't they work now? Because some Danes implied that only placebos are effected by "waxing and waning?"

Placebos work 1/3 of the time; giving no medication works 1/3 of the time; active drugs work 1/3 of the time. Not to be repetitive, but that's 2/3 in favor of self-healing folks! Case fucking closed.

And now, finally, the concluding comments of the article. Just look at how they ended this commercial for Dow Chemical:

"But, Dr. Bailar said, he understands the reluctance many will feel to abandon their belief in placebos. He, too, is hesitant to wrench himself completely away from what he now thinks is largely a myth.

"I'm not ready to give up on placebos entirely," Dr. Bailar said. "I hope there will be a lot more research on how they work."

Or, he said, "if they work."