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November, a new type of gene therapy for Parkinson’s disease, championed by the Michael J. Fox Foundation, was abruptly withdrawn from Phase II trials after unexpectedly tanking against placebo.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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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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