Contemporary medical research puts much effort into excluding the placebo effect when testing new drugs. For example, in clinical trials of a new vaccine, some participants may get injected with saline so that no one knows whether he got vaccinated or not. Scientists mainly see the placebo effect as a mere nuisance, which increases the cost of research, and annoys participants. If this effect is so powerful and pervasive, doesn’t it deserve closer examination?
We have sequenced human DNA, yet, fighting colds, we rely on tradition more than science. Many have practiced meditation or have friends who do, but you would likely find less decent research papers concerning it than about some exotic disease. Instead, you will get your eyes sore from reading through pseudoscientific speculation and superstition.
There is an ongoing debate about whether psychology is a science.
Opponents argue that psychology is not rigorous enough, that it doesn’t fit their criteria. I would answer that the first criterion of science is that it should help us understand the world.
Absolute rigor is only possible in math. As for natural sciences, it is a relative matter and question of methodology. Human behavior is a consequence of biological processes, which, in turn, may be described in terms of chemical reactions and physical interactions. The scientific community agrees that all real-world sciences lean on two pillars, “Quantum Field Theory” regarding microworld and “General Relativity” regarding gravity. However, mathematicians complain, “Quantum Field Theory itself lacks a formal mathematical foundation.”
Science begins with generating hypotheses, most of which are false. The scientific method is about validation, and this is where pseudoscience fails.
What makes people crackpot pseudoscientists?
They fall in love with their own theories so that they don’t want to question them. That’s a manifestation of confirmation bias, which makes one favor ideas based on his attitude toward them rather than their logical consistency.
They start like regular students, but later, upon gaining confidence, they turn crackpots. Being busy with their own theories, they are not very fond of learning existing scientific findings. Take physics for an example. Anyone who has grasped the concept of Minkowski space agrees that Einstein’s Special Theory of Relativity is much more elegant than Aether Theory. However, there are still people reinventing aether. They have learned that light is waves, just like sound, and the idea of a medium for light to propagate carried them away.
The irony is that conservative scientists are also susceptible to confirmation bias. It just works the other way. They are in love with the established picture of the world and their know-it-all self-perception. That’s why it takes so long for revolutionary new ideas to get accepted by the scientific community. Mind you, Albert Einstein, who had revolutionized physics with his “General Relativity,” never accepted quantum theory and spent the rest of his life nursing his own theories, which describe particles as black holes.
No matter how sophisticated theories one may consider in physics, reality always has the last word. Observations are unambiguous and reproducible. But what happens when observations become subjective? What if the observer gets to cut corners by thought experiments? The influence of confirmation bias becomes way more significant.
Some topics have spawned so many superstitions that they became toxic for decent researchers, who want to have nothing in common with crackpots crowding around. However, as a poorly explored area, such topics may promise great opportunities.
For example, when people consider consciousness outside the scope of thinking, they stumble upon a spectrum of superstitions, which shadows a simple idea. Attention is much older than anything that reminds thinking. Just as attention directs the behavior of the animal, so it can affect some vegetative functions. There are many indications that attention is a big deal in humoral regulation. Some of them follow.
The proper placebo-controlled study, “Effects of Mind-Body Training on Cytokines and Their Interactions with Catecholamines,” showed that attention shifts balance from pro-inflammatory to anti-inflammatory cytokines. That may come in handy in the fight against COVID-19.
One can assume that fixation on the source of pain is natural for an animal at rest. People have learned to divert their attention, or worse, to use painkillers. However, sometimes they don’t, and this called pain meditation. Yoga makes a practitioner meditate on pain in ligaments and joints. The vipassana meditation practice, which translates as “investigation,” is about a detailed scan of the body. This could be a good topic for research.
Common Cold took its name from the common observation that exposure to low temperatures increases the body’s susceptibility to this disease. Surprisingly, research conducted in the ’60s showed no such correlation. The study was a bit superficial. The cooling procedures were the focus of attention for the test subjects. It correlates with the alternative method of treatment prescribing to deep feet into cold water for 1 minute. There is a tradition in Russia and Finland to jump into the snow after a hot sauna. Furthermore, cold resistance can be trained. One may suspect that thermoregulation and immune subsystems compete for some resource and that attention and training resolve this conflict.
It is easy to come up with new hypotheses. There is nothing wrong with that. But one has to remember that these are only hypotheses until proven, no matter how beautiful and desirable are they.
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