Placebo
Why do modern math-minds have such difficulty understanding ancient wisdom?
Their failure is not their fault. They can’t help it!
I remember what it was like for the math-minds in high school. Do you remember those days? Some kids were good at math and others were good at languages. Some were “number people” and some were “letter people.” The number people got great marks in algebra, geometry and trigonometry. The letter people were best at English and languages. Because ancient wisdom was written mostly by ancient letter people, it is difficult to understand for most number people. Their math minds need a different translation of ancient writing.
Number people love logic. They love formulae. When they see “3-2 = 1”, that = sign is an important expression of truth for number people. For letter people, “3-2 = 1” is only one of many expressions of the truth they see. For them, there are an infinite number of numeric combinations, all of which equal one. For example, 4-3=1, 66 +33-98=1, 12X12-143=1. There are infinite numeric combinations, all of which =1.
Number people see the simple beauty in numbers and equations. Precision and logic, for them, are things of beauty. They understand their world through the mechanisms of their formulae. Their math minds love the limitations imposed by logic; they love how they can comprehend more and more complex ideas by simply adding more and more mathematical formulae to the mix.
Letter people, on the other hand, will say:” Mary is 12-6+2-7, John is 9-8, Susie is 5+4-3+1-6, Bill is 7-3-3. See? We are all one.” Letter people do not need rigorous logic in their thinking. Approximations and synonyms are fine for letter people. Letter people resent the limitations of logic and precision. They prefer the worlds of poetic justice, pathos and irony.
Most ancient wisdom was written and has been translated by letter people. This creates a problem for the number people.
For example, let’s look at the ancient Story of Stone Stew. It tells of a great famine in India. An old woman went to her guru to ask for advice on how she could survive the famine. Her teacher advised her to repeat the mantra of a certain Indian goddess and then cook stones and eat them. But unfortunately, her teacher made a mistake and gave her the wrong mantra. The woman had placed great faith in her teacher, went home and repeated the mistaken mantra. With great faith, she cooked stones and ate them.
Her son was a monk. He was worried about his mother’s health and went home to check on her. He was surprised to see her plump and well-nourished. When he asked her to explain why, she recited the mistaken mantra and told him that she had been eating stones. The young monk immediately noticed that the mantra was wrong and he corrected his mother. His mother became very agitated, and upset because she had been reciting an incorrect mantra. She started to repeat both the correct mantra and the incorrect mantra. But no matter what she did, she no longer received nutrition from the stones.
This ancient story teaches us six important lessons:
1. She was a woman of faith.
2. She went to her guru for help.
3. She followed her guru’s instructions.
4. She ate the pebble stew and received nourishment.
5. Her son inadvertently destroyed her faith.
6. She no longer received nourishment from the rocks.
The lessons that the ancient storytellers were teaching was that the miracle occurred because of the old woman’s faith, not because of the mantra recitation. In other words, faith counts, not the exact recitation of some magic word.
Because of their lack of experience in faith, many modern people dismiss this story as silly superstition. I believe this harsh judgement is made because The Stone Stew Story has been so poorly translated. Let me now tell you the modern day equivalent of The Stone Stew Story.
In testing new drugs, scientists do experiments to determine how effective the drug is at curing the disease. In these experiments, one group of patients is given the drug. Another group of patients is given nothing. A third group of patients is given a placebo and told it is the new drug. A placebo is a pill with no medical significance. It’s like a sugar pill. For this fictitious illustration, let’s say that there were 100 patients in each group. At typical result would be:
Those given the drug had a 75% recovery.
Those not given anything had a 10% spontaneous recovery.
Those given the placebo had a 25% recovery. This is called the placebo effect.
The placebo people are like the woman who had faith in her gurus instructions. The placebo people had faith in modern medicine.
These experiments illustrate how our faith is held in the context of our life and our beliefs. The context for ancient beliefs was stories and spirituality. The context for modern beliefs is science, medicine and logic. But the lesson is the same: our faith or lack of faith directly affects our health. The old slogan, “mind over matter,” is true.
Let me spin another tale for you: a tale that shows how very dramatic the placebo effect has been.
It’s another drug experiment story. The drug, cimetidine, was created in the mid-1970s by pharmaceutical company, SmithKline and French and marketed as a miracle cure for ulcers. Cimetidine soon became the most widely studied drug ever. Experiments were conducted in universities and laboratories all over the world. The results were fabulous. Cimetidine really worked. If you need proof, just Google cimetidine research: you will find dozens of research papers on this topic. Here is how one such paper summarized some of this research:
“At least 10 double-blind, placebo-controlled studies examining the short term clinical effects of cimetidine in patients with duodenal ulcers have been published in the English language. Together these 10 studies provide compelling evidence that cimetidine promotes healing of duodenal ulcers. Overall, the rate of healing in 4 to 6 weeks among cimetidine treated patients was approximately 70%, almost twice the level achieved by the placebo treated patients (36%). Similar results were obtained in a half dozen additional studies conducted in France, West Germany, Italy, and Spain.”
Based on this research, the number of patients cured by the drug was approximately equal to the number of patients cured by their faith. (70% – 36% = 34%.) Our assumption is that the 36% cure rate from the placebo group also applied to the drug group: 36% of the drug group where healed by their faith. But faith healing is not popular in the medical research crowd.
Our science story has a surprise ending.
In the early 1980s, two doctors from Perth, Australia, discovered that duodenal ulcers are not caused by excessive stomach acid. Cimetidine was thought to cure duodenal ulcers by reducing excess stomach acid. The actual cause of duodenal ulcers is a specific bacteria and the actual cure involves antibiotics. The two doctors from Perth where eventually awarded the Nobel Prize for this wonderful discovery.
This means that all of the recoveries by patients who had been told they were getting the drug – all of them, were placebo effect. The real cure for duodenal ulcers is antibiotics, not antacid pills. In this context, the cimetidine had the same effect as a sugar pill. That means that 70% of those patients with duodenal ulcers were cured by their faith that the pill would cure them, not knowing, of course, that the pill was only a placebo. All the experiments done on cimetidine demonstrate the power of faith in healing duodenal ulcers.
Let’s not forget the patients in the ‘no treatment’ group. Only 10% of them recovered. Apparently their immune systems were adequate to defend them from this disease. This would be comparable to the old woman after her son told her that her mantra was wrong, and she lost her faith. This control group never had faith.
One of the reasons why these cimetidine experiments were so good, is because the cimetidine increased the patient’s faith in the cure. Cimetidine prevents stomach acid. Stomach acid causes pain for a person with ulcers. When the pain stopped because of the cimetidine, the patient’s would rejoice because it doesn’t hurt anymore. This would increase their faith that “this stuff works!” It would increase their faith, just like the guru’s instructions increased the old woman’s faith.
The ancient version of this story, The Story of Stone Stew, worked for ancient minds. The modern version, The Story of Cimetidine, should work for modern minds.
But it doesn’t.
Many modern minds do not accept the evidence presented by the cimetidine studies because of their belief systems. Many modern minds do not understand the placebo effect, even though the evidence is presented in a scientific manner.
The placebo effect is real. The cimetidine experiments illustrate that with the rigour of modern scientific convention. Faith healing is the future of medicine.
Who knew more about faith than the ancient ones? That’s why it’s so important to re-translate ancient writing into modern language, so that modern math-minds can comprehend it.
It is also important that scientists and medical professionals re-visit their basic belief systems. Ask yourself: “Are my beliefs based on observation and logic? Or, are my observations and logic based on my beliefs?”
KennyDN.com March 2022