The existence of God and the efficacy of prayer

[Pixel42]

Remissions do not all occur owing to a person holding some belief for some particular reason, eg that some treatment will deal with their problem, the problem being why the body had responded by developing the cancer. Cancer is a barrier of cells. A very bad solution to try and protect some area from possible harm.

If the person moves away from the people, who were harming them, as I had initially done, or if the people wanting to do harm for some reason stop playing the foul games, then the body will move into remission because the problem is gone.

You have admitted you do not have a shred of objective evidence for this hypothesis, just your own anecdotal experiences. To state it as if it were fact without adequate evidence is not just premature but extremely offensive to cancer sufferers and the people who love them.

There have been cancer sufferers who were surrounded by people who loved them who have died. There have been cancer sufferers who were hated by everyone around them who went into remission. Your hypothesis needs a considerable amount of statistical evidence to support it; until then it can be dismissed out of hand based on considerably more anecdotal evidence than you have produced.

I have seen some cases where faith healers have brought about healing, though not of cancer. However you need to also appreciate that the media is not unbiased. Their biggest provider of funds is the pharmaceutical industry, whether through the front or the back door.

There are plenty of media outlets who would love to stick it to the pharmaceutical industry. There are plenty of media outlets who give publicity to alternative medicine and fraudsters like John of God, regardless of whether the pharmaceutical indusrtry approves.. Once again, what you are claiming seems to have no relationship with the real world.

Thousands of people have spontaneous remissions every year, yet we NEVER hear anything about them. NOT A WORD! Don't you find that strange?

I've certainly heard about them. I've already mentioned the article I read quite recently looking at a possible explanation for them. Perhaps you haven't been looking in the right places?

 

[Pixel42]

There is no perceived improvement about it. It is a cure in many cases. And the treatment is described as ineffective or as a sham treatment and yet they know that is very deceitful way of describing it.

The sugar pill is NOT the placebo and doctors know that but they insist on calling it the placebo.

In clinical practice, when it was still acceptable to do so, a sugar pill was given WITH the suggestion that it is strong medicine and will make them well. The sugar pill is an anchor for the suggestion. A placebo includes both the doctor's suggestion AND the trust of the patient in the doctor.

In a drug trial where a dummy pill is given, then the situation is different. The patients in a drug trial are desperate for a solution to the medical problems. Thus it is easy for many of them to believe that they have been given the real drug. So it is the patient that upholds the belief that they have a medicine that will solve their problem and make them well.

I saw a spectacular placebo effect myself. I later understood why it worked but at the time I had worked in my garden cutting down some guinea grass and when I came back inside I had a huge rash on my arm that lasted for an hour or more. I found it strange since I had cut those grasses for many years and never had a problem.

The rash happened a few times. The second time it happened I decided to wash it with witch hazel, which had been the recommendation of a friend. To my surprise the rash vanished in about ten or fifteen minutes.

When I told my husband he laughed and said it was definitely a placebo effect. I said don't you believe the witch hazel helped? He proceeded to tell me that he had accidentally spilt the witch hazel and had started to rinse the bottle with water to put it into the recyclable waste but was interrupted and left the bottle by the sink. I later found it put the top on and put it back in the cupboard.

So I had washed my arm with plain water thinking it was witch hazel. The reality is that I had a belief that the witch hazel would clear away any toxic substance from the guinea grass so my body no longer ignited any inflammatory response. So the redness stopped and the rash went away. The rash was only an inflammatory response, which arose when I had bought into an idea that the weeds were toxic. That means that the rash was a nocebo effect.

I have since been targeted in the same way by the same people but I no longer buy the idea. I just reject the idea and affirm that the weeds are harmless and I now no longer get any rash.

You still seem to be misunderstanding what it means when we say a medical treatment is effective: it means that the treatment has an effect over and above placebo. If symptoms are relieved by a placebo then those symptoms are, by definition, at least partly psychosomatic; they are partly a product of the mind, so a treatment whose effect is also psychological can reduce or even remove them. Your anecdote is an excellent example. Water is not an effective remedy for rashes which are produced by genuinely toxic substances. It "worked" in your case because both symptoms and "cure" were entirely in your mind. (Paragraph edited to clarify).

Real illnesses cannot be cured by placebo. A type 1 diabetic needs insulin; no amount of placebos will help.

 

[Pup]

Thousands of people have spontaneous remissions every year, yet we NEVER hear anything about them. NOT A WORD! Don't you find that strange?

I do find it a little strange that someone interested in spontaneous remissions wouldn't search the literature first before making such a claim, but when one factors in a strong desire to believe the reports are concealed and perhaps a hope that no one else will bother to search, the behavior becomes less strange.

Here's a quick search, limited to scientific reports and not popular articles, 2010 or more recent:

Immunity over inability: The spontaneous regression of cancer
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3312698/

Spontaneous regression of malignant tumors: Importance of the immune system and other factors (Review)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3412538/

Spontaneous regression of pancreatic cancer: Real or a misdiagnosis?
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3380317/

Spontaneous regression of renal cell carcinoma
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3685371/

Spontaneous Regression of Hepatocellular Cancer: Case Report and Review of Literature
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3283101/

Clinical trial: "There has been a recent report of a colony of cancer-resistant mice developed from a single male mouse that unexpectedly survived challenges of lethal cancer cell injections. In these so-called spontaneous regression/complete resistant (SR/CR) mice, cancer cells are killed by rapid infiltration of leukocytes, mainly of innate immunity."
https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT00900497

Spontaneous regression of metastatic cancer cells in the lymph node: a case report
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4025537/

The phenomenon of spontaneous regression has been well described in infants with neuroblastoma, especially in infants with the 4S pattern of metastatic spread.
http://www.cancer.gov/types/neuroblastoma/hp/neuroblastoma-treatment-pdq#link/_554_toc

Spontaneous Regression of Endobronchial Carcinoid Tumor.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27367850

Spontaneous regression of multiple pulmonary nodules in a patient with unclassified renal cell carcinoma following laparoscopic partial nephrectomy: A case report.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27330764

Apparent spontaneous regression of malignant neoplasms after radiography: Report of four cases.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27318016

Spontaneous regression of a pulmonary adenocarcinoma (in French)
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27266898

Spontaneous regression in advanced squamous cell lung carcinoma.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27076978

Spontaneous Regression of Hepatocellular Carcinoma with Multiple Lung Metastases: A Case Report and Review of the Literature.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/27038447

 

[Dancing David]

The truth though is different. This patient stopped reacting as to grow cancers because HE BELIEVED THAT HE HAD A DIFFERENT METHOD OF DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM, i.e., A DRUG. His body simply stopped reacting as it had been doing and cleaned up.

This is your unfounded assertion, you can not just assume that the placebo effects is why something happened, unless you rule out all other confounding factors

 

[kyrani99]

Placebo as good as surgery!

The placebo effect is a perceived improvement in a medical condition when a patient is given an ineffective treatment.

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259#t=article
A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee

Both the treatment and the control groups reported improvement in function at 12 months, and although the report interprets the study as having proved the efficacy of lavage, there was no statistically significant difference between the groups in terms of the primary outcome at any point during follow-up.

What this is saying is that the sham surgery gave just as good a result as the real surgery.

Here 6mins on youtube with the doctor doing the surgery talking and showing the surgery done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTebG-XcxpY

 

[Pup]

Here are my two placebo effect anecdotes.

I was given an antibiotic (can't remember the name, this was a couple years ago) and the pharmacist said, this has a bad reputation for causing nausea. Did your doctor prescribe something for nausea too? I said no, I'll be fine. He insisted it was a common problem but could be treated, and at the first sign of nausea, call my doctor.

He was wearing the white coat, standing in the pharmacy, had that nocebo effect going full blast for something that can be psychosomatic.

I took the antibiotic. Had no nausea.

I have no doubt there's a real nocebo effect, but it doesn't always work.

Other anecdote. I had just been diagnosed with cancer and hadn't studied it yet. I had been through a spell of being given false promises by doctors: this will control the pain (it doesn't); this won't make you feel bad (throw up all night); this won't hurt (oops, sorry, here's some norco). I was generally pissed and distrustful of anything a doctor said.

Then the mutation test came back and they said, this targeted pill will shrink the tumor for a year with almost no side effects. Yeah, right. I didn't believe them at all. I didn't even take it for a while, but when I did, guess what? It shrunk the tumor for a year with almost no side effects. It was real medicine, which worked whether I believed in it or not.

 

[Pixel42]

http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259#t=article
A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee

Both the treatment and the control groups reported improvement in function at 12 months, and although the report interprets the study as having proved the efficacy of lavage, there was no statistically significant difference between the groups in terms of the primary outcome at any point during follow-up.

What this is saying is that the sham surgery gave just as good a result as the real surgery.

Here 6mins on youtube with the doctor doing the surgery talking and showing the surgery done. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JTebG-XcxpY

Yes, sham surgery can also have a placebo effect. There is a perceived effect from an ineffective (in this case non existent) treatment. So even surgery needs to be double blind tested to be sure that it is truly effective.

Do you think you're telling me something I didn't already know?

 

[kyrani99]

I do find it a little strange that someone interested in spontaneous remissions wouldn't search the literature first before making such a claim, but when one factors in a strong desire to believe the reports are concealed and perhaps a hope that no one else will bother to search, the behavior becomes less strange.

Here's a quick search, limited to scientific reports and not popular articles, 2010 or more recent:

I said there were 3,500 cases documented and published in medical journals and archived at Noetic Sciences.

I was talking about these cases been shown in the media so that the general public could see them. I have never seen any of them on television or heard them on radio. They are not obvious on medical internet sites either. You have to go looking for them.

 

[kyrani99]

Yes, sham surgery can also have a placebo effect. There is a perceived effect from an ineffective (in this case non existent) treatment. So even surgery needs to be double blind tested to be sure that it is truly effective.

Do you think you're telling me something I didn't already know?

No, no, not this "]even surgery needs to be double blind tested to be sure that it is truly effective".

Even surgery is measured against faith healing to be sure that it is truly effective.. and not just as good as faith healing.

 

[Emily's Cat]

A cancer mass is real. However the ideas that were bought enough to become beliefs and be reacted to are not real, they are hateful suggestions and nothing else. Once a person sees this they can stop reacting and their body will move to spontaneous remission.

The body is purpose-driven and NOT A MACHINE.

I've rolled this around a lot, and I keep coming back to this as your claim:

Cancer is caused by bad/wrong/toxic beliefs. The body reacts to bad/wrong/toxic beliefs by creating cancer cells. IF the person can be guided to let go of their bad/wrong/toxic beliefs, then their body will stop reacting to it and go back to it's normative good/healthy state - which means they will go in to spontaneous remission.

Is that an accurate paraphrase of what you're trying to convey?

 

[kyrani99]

Here are my two placebo effect anecdotes.

I was given an antibiotic (can't remember the name, this was a couple years ago) and the pharmacist said, this has a bad reputation for causing nausea. Did your doctor prescribe something for nausea too? I said no, I'll be fine. He insisted it was a common problem but could be treated, and at the first sign of nausea, call my doctor.

He was wearing the white coat, standing in the pharmacy, had that nocebo effect going full blast for something that can be psychosomatic.

I took the antibiotic. Had no nausea.

I have no doubt there's a real nocebo effect, but it doesn't always work.

This is a case of positive thinking. You upheld the belief that you would be fine, i.e., you'd have no nausea. BELIEF.

Other anecdote. I had just been diagnosed with cancer and hadn't studied it yet. I had been through a spell of being given false promises by doctors: this will control the pain (it doesn't); this won't make you feel bad (throw up all night); this won't hurt (oops, sorry, here's some norco). I was generally pissed and distrustful of anything a doctor said.

Then the mutation test came back and they said, this targeted pill will shrink the tumor for a year with almost no side effects. Yeah, right. I didn't believe them at all. I didn't even take it for a while, but when I did, guess what? It shrunk the tumor for a year with almost no side effects. It was real medicine, which worked whether I believed in it or not.

This doesn't negate the nocebo or placebo effect. Medicine does have a pharmaceutical effect. That is what is verified at the drug trial.

Interesting might be if you had taken the drug right away, what would have happened? It may have still worked. But you may have waited till you felt right about taking it seeing you had so much bad experience before hand.

 

[Emily's Cat]

There is no perceived improvement about it. It is a cure in many cases. And the treatment is described as ineffective or as a sham treatment and yet they know that is very deceitful way of describing it.

The sugar pill is NOT the placebo and doctors know that but they insist on calling it the placebo.

In clinical practice, when it was still acceptable to do so, a sugar pill was given WITH the suggestion that it is strong medicine and will make them well. The sugar pill is an anchor for the suggestion. A placebo includes both the doctor's suggestion AND the trust of the patient in the doctor.

In a drug trial where a dummy pill is given, then the situation is different. The patients in a drug trial are desperate for a solution to the medical problems. Thus it is easy for many of them to believe that they have been given the real drug. So it is the patient that upholds the belief that they have a medicine that will solve their problem and make them well.

I saw a spectacular placebo effect myself. I later understood why it worked but at the time I had worked in my garden cutting down some guinea grass and when I came back inside I had a huge rash on my arm that lasted for an hour or more. I found it strange since I had cut those grasses for many years and never had a problem.

The rash happened a few times. The second time it happened I decided to wash it with witch hazel, which had been the recommendation of a friend. To my surprise the rash vanished in about ten or fifteen minutes.

When I told my husband he laughed and said it was definitely a placebo effect. I said don't you believe the witch hazel helped? He proceeded to tell me that he had accidentally spilt the witch hazel and had started to rinse the bottle with water to put it into the recyclable waste but was interrupted and left the bottle by the sink. I later found it put the top on and put it back in the cupboard.

So I had washed my arm with plain water thinking it was witch hazel. The reality is that I had a belief that the witch hazel would clear away any toxic substance from the guinea grass so my body no longer ignited any inflammatory response. So the redness stopped and the rash went away. The rash was only an inflammatory response, which arose when I had bought into an idea that the weeds were toxic. That means that the rash was a nocebo effect.

I have since been targeted in the same way by the same people but I no longer buy the idea. I just reject the idea and affirm that the weeds are harmless and I now no longer get any rash.

Occam's Razor: The water rinsed away whatever surface substance was causing the reaction.

Example: the sap from the plumeria tree usually causes itchiness and redness. But it rinses off easily with plain old water (quicker with a little soap) and the itchiness clears up within just 15 minutes or so.

 

[Pixel42]

I said there were 3,500 cases documented and published in medical journals and archived at Noetic Sciences.

I was right, you are looking in the wrong place.

ETA: http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Noetic_science

No, no, not this "]even surgery needs to be double blind tested to be sure that it is truly effective".

Even surgery is measured against faith healing to be sure that it is truly effective.. and not just as good as faith healing.

The placebo effect and faith healing are two different things. To show that any form of faith healing is effective you would need to show that it has an effect over and above placebo, same as for any other treatment.

 

[Donn]

Whether deliberately or not medical science has misrepresented cancer.
There is no way that spontaneous, random genetic mutations, naturally selected for fitness, can produce genetic signatures of thousands of genes as seen in millions of people worldwide with the same cancers.

You are saying that orange juice is not orange juice.

A cancer mass is real. However the ideas that were bought enough to become beliefs and be reacted to are not real, they are hateful suggestions and nothing else. Once a person sees this they can stop reacting and their body will move to spontaneous remission.

One cannot wish away cells. Your entire edifice turns on this fiction.

The body is purpose-driven and NOT A MACHINE.

What you think that means is anyone's guess.

The truth shall triumph, then where will you be?

Waiting to applaud your work and bid farewell to cancer. I feel certain, however, that you are altogether frivolous.

 

[Pup]

I said there were 3,500 cases documented and published in medical journals and archived at Noetic Sciences.

I was talking about these cases been shown in the media so that the general public could see them. I have never seen any of them on television or heard them on radio. They are not obvious on medical internet sites either. You have to go looking for them.

I thought you meant it wasn't taken seriously by the "real" medical community, and one had to go through a site like Noetic Sciences to find case studies.

If it's popular articles you want, well, there's not as much about rare stuff, because it's rare. I've never just run across an article or news item about my kind of cancer either, without looking. Doesn't mean the publications think rare things don't exist. Doesn't mean there's a conspiracy to keep them hidden. There are hundreds of angles about cancer to cover, which is just one disease out of hundreds to cover, and there are only so many pages or so much air time. If your post was supposed to whip up some sort of emotion about a conspiracy to keep spontaneous remission hidden, it's not working for me. If that wasn't the purpose, then I have no clue what it was.

A quick google pulled up

Medscape
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/827945

Chicago Tribune
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifes.../ct-cancer-remission-met--20140914-story.html

Discover Magazine
http://discovermagazine.com/2007/sep/the-body-can-stave-off-terminal-cancer-sometimes

BBC
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20150306-the-mystery-of-vanishing-cancer

 

[kyrani99]

This is your unfounded assertion, you can not just assume that the placebo effects is why something happened, unless you rule out all other confounding factors

Why did the placebo effect happen?

I am not making any unfounded assertions.
My reasoning is based on the evidence of the cause of cancer and have been able to use what I found, repeatedly, to clear the cancer away.

The first two times when I developed cancer I only saw evidence that:-

a). moving away lead to a fairly rapid movement towards spontaneous remission, i.e., within the first 3-4 weeks I saw some serious symptoms disappear and "no evidence of disease" within the year. I had stage 4 cancer.

b). resolving an issue also lead to fairly rapid remission, this time the lump vanished in a month.

Then there were another 5 cancers, in which I used the occasions to make observations, and then deliberately moved my body to spontaneous remission.

And there were at least another 7 or 8 occasions where I was able to prevent my body from developing cancer. I used the first few of these occasion to observe the rise of inflammation and then deliberately cleared away. And the rest of them to observe cells in the area remained unperturbed.

There has also been one very recent attempt using subliminal ideas and I was able to ward that off too.

This means that I saw that:
1. when I stopped reacting my body reversed the cancer and cleared away the mass AND later
2. when I no longer reacted to the ideas that were being presented to me, my body didn't develop cancer.

I resolved the problem with the benefit of my earlier training in Vipassana. The average person doesn't have such training.

However, given what I have seen and the results I have seen, it is reasonable to say "because HE BELIEVED THAT HE HAD A DIFFERENT METHOD OF DEALING WITH THE PROBLEM, i.e., A DRUG."

The person's body simply stopped reacting as it had been doing, i.e., in developing a mass as a protective barrier, and cleaned up because he now believed that the drug would do the job of protecting instead of a cell barrier.

If he had believed that the drug would simply kill the cancer then it would not have worked at all because the body is building a barrier for a purpose, but a purpose that is not appropriate. So a belief in a drug that kills the cancer won't solve the problem.

That is why you see many cases where the chemotherapy kills the cancer but it comes back and it comes back in a form that is resistant to the chem drug. In fact there are cases where the cancer has even become resistant to radiation therapy and immuno-therapy. Why? because the body is building the cancer mass for a purpose.

 

[Pup]

This is a case of positive thinking. You upheld the belief that you would be fine, i.e., you'd have no nausea. BELIEF.

And yet another time, it didn't work, even with the placebo effect. Woman in white coat says this is a very safe painkiller, and I'll give you an antinausea shot too, with a medicine so gentle we use it on pregnant women for morning sickness. This was late night at the ER before hospital admission, and I was looking forward to being admitted and having symptoms controlled. So I had a full-on placebo effect going, combined with positive thinking.

I had anxiety attacks till the painkiller wore off 12 hours later, and started vomiting first thing in the morning. Absolute hell. Absolutely unexpected. As soon as the medicines got out of my body, the hospital switched to others, and I was fine and went home in a couple days with a new painkiller and appetite stimulant, feeling much better, as I hoped.

I think there's a real placebo/nocebo effect, but it can't necessarily overrule what's happening physically, if the physical effect is too strong. My body apparently really didn't like those medicines.

That's probably the heart of our differences, because I don't think the placebo/nocebo effect is so strong that it can replace regular medicine to cure cancer or other serious ailments. In my case, it can't even stop anxiety attacks and vomiting, but if someone else said it did that for them, I'd believe that was the real cause, because those are the kinds of things it's known to work for.

 

[I Am The Scum]

There is a push to try and say that a placebo is all about how a patient is treated and the doctors support and blah, blah, blah, when they know full well that IF a person BELIEVES that whatever they are given, will make them well again, they will get well again. It is not hard. The person stops reacting and relaxes so they return to resting metabolism, which means the bodily reactivity is gone... i.e., health is restored.

Show me someone meditating an amputated limb back on.

Or tell me why patients in vegetative states are not guaranteed to get better. They are far more relaxed than you or I will ever be.

 

[Pup]

There has also been one very recent attempt using subliminal ideas and I was able to ward that off too.

You mentioned something similar in a previous post, and I meant to ask about it then. Do you believe that a specific person has deliberately tried to give you cancer?

 

[Emily's Cat]

Why did the placebo effect happen?

I am not making any unfounded assertions.
My reasoning is based on the evidence of the cause of cancer and have been able to use what I found, repeatedly, to clear the cancer away.

The first two times when I developed cancer I only saw evidence that:-
...
Then there were another 5 cancers

Just for clarification, how many of those 7 cancers were diagnosed by a medical professional?