What a fascinating development. Sugar pills beat the compounded drugs in an increasing number of trials.
The upshot is fewer new medicines available to ailing patients and more financial woes for the beleaguered pharmaceutical industry. Last November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo.
A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn's disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.It's not only trials of new drugs that are crossing the futility boundary. Some products that have been on the market for decades, like Prozac, are faltering in more recent follow-up tests. In many cases, these are the compounds that, in the late '90s, made Big Pharma more profitable than Big Oil. But if these same drugs were vetted now, the FDA might not approve some of them. Two comprehensive analyses of antidepressant trials have uncovered a dramatic increase in placebo response since the 1980s.
One estimated that the so-called effect size a measure of statistical significance in placebo groups had nearly doubled over that time.It’s not that the old meds are getting weaker, drug developers say. It’s as if the placebo effect is somehow getting stronger.
via Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why..
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If you think about it, the fact that there is any placebo effect at all is a miracle. Or, I should say, seems like a miracle, although it is just a function of the natural world, left un-messed-with by tinkering nihilists. Notice the phrase “could be used to create various new treatments” for some diseases. New treatments? Why not thoroughly investigate the two most highly developed medical systems in the world: Chinese herbal medicine, and Indian Ayurveda, both of which include meditation and breath work. Both these traditions, I feel, should be included underneath the category of Yoga, since it is Yoga that seeks to ever refine our appreciation of the divine in every cell of our bodies.
The scientists say that the brain releases endogenous opioids when dealing with pain, and that it releases them in equally large quantities in the case of the actual painkiller and the placebo treatment. These opioids work like opiates, and temper the activity inflicted in the spine cord by the application of a painful stimulus. Eippert says that the knowledge could be used to create various new treatments for chronic pain and other conditions that would take advantage of the power of belief.
via Placebo Effect Proven in the Spine – Pain disappeared in study volunteers – Softpedia.
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Dr Lesley Walker, director of cancer information at Cancer Research UK, said: "This is interesting research which opens up the possibility that natural chemicals found in turmeric could be developed into new treatments for oesophageal cancer.
Why is it seemingly impossible for these researchers to get it through their heads that there are synergies that enhance wellness, whereas the western model of extracting the so called active ingredient and applying it to the body in a totally unnatural way would be beneficial.
Obviously, the medical establishment likes to isolate things because then you can charge big money for them. Instead, it would be much easier if people just ate properly!
For example, most days I make a drink Antoinette taught me about from ghee, turmeric, a few other herbal ingredients, and milk. It’s amazing to me that almost no one picks up on something like this. The way I prepare this is to melt the ghee, then dissolve the turmeric mixture into it. When that is bubbly, I add the milk, and bring it just to boil. This method releases properties from the turmeric into the fat of the ghee and the milk. Better by far than some damn pill or shot!
BBC NEWS | Health | Curry spice ‘kills cancer cells’
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via Symposium sheds light on benefits of Tai Chi (08/28/09).
The symposium, sponsored by the International Yang family Tai Chi Chuan Association, offered a chance to study with five of China’s top masters and the opportunity to learn more about the latest research on the health benefits of Tai Chi Chuan.
More than 400 Tai Chi masters, scholars and practitioners from across the world came to Vanderbilt this summer for a special symposium sponsored by the Vanderbilt Center for Integrative Health.
It is a good thing to see, these symposiums, put on by actual programs at Universities. It has taken so long… traditional methods coming to the attention of the west many years ago. It is the only hope for real reform of out medical industry from one of slice and dice drug pushing doctors and other industry specialists, to a field oriented toward real healing, and the integration of all aspects of what it means to be a human being.
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The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day.
Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels which can be seen with the naked eye. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light
GW says:
This is very good, although I can just hear the allopathic stick-in-the-muds saying that the energy is so faint as to be irrelevant.
In truth, everything is energy. The Bible says it: In the beginning, God said, let there be light.
Unfortunately, then things get weird in the Western tradition, since it all devolves into some really strange theology. You have to go to yoga and Buddhism along with its antecedents in Upanishadic and Vedic Hinduism to find the whole thing explained. The Taoists in China also got it right.
What these traditions have always taught, and this has served as the fundamental basis of their medical traditions, is that this “light” is actually living substance, and it is this substance that is the origin of all mind, matter and consciousness. So disease is treated as an imbalance in the energy and light of the living entity.
The Western, allopathic model of dice and slice, as well as bombard with radiation and chemicals works in trauma situations like extreme physical emergencies, but for the overwhelming majority of imbalances in the human system that lead to chronic disease, the model tends to be worse than useless, often creating more problems that curing, with all the side effects.
via Your Body Literally Glows With Light.
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