[ExI] Capitalizing on "Life Extension"

[Stefano Vaj]

On Mon, Nov 3, 2008 at 2:49 AM, Damien Broderick <thespike at satx.rr.com>wrote:

> That would seem highly likely. My working assumption, of course, is that
> "prayers of healing" or "therapeutic intent" etc, if they do work, DON'T do
> so by persuading some Vast Eternal All-Wise Cosmic Creator of the Cosmos to
> fuck about with the immutable laws He set up, or by reprogramming the Matrix
> Simulation. My guess is that it would have to be some kind of nonlocal field
> effect, where the informational state of the "healer" somehow directly
> interfaces with relevant portions of the patient's brain/body and tweaks its
> immune system, say, rather in the way a part of one's own mind/brain can do
> the same thing to oneself through meditation, hypnosis, relaxation, etc. A
> guess only, of course, since I am neither a physicist nor a medico.
>

Or it might even be a purely *local* effect, especially when we are more
concerned with actual healing than with double-and-triple blindness, as it
is the case for most of anedoctical  (yet abundant) evidence.

In fact, discarding placebo effects themselves as a mere disturbance to
clinical studies seems stupid, and they should be better researched IMHO in
the first place, as long as they appear by definition to influence the
results of the trials.

Stefano Vaj
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