The Healing Effects of Belief in Medical Practices and Spirituality.
Frederic A Alling
Explore April 28, 2015 DOI: 10.1016/j.explore.2015.04.002 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Topics | Shamanism |
| Keywords | Nerve net Humans Spirituality Placebo effect Culture Mind-body therapies Unconscious mind Logotherapy State vs. trait Transcendent experiences |
| Key points | Argues that placebo responses and spiritual or transcendent experiences both promote self-healing and appear to engage comparable, perhaps identical, neural systems, and proposes that therapists can facilitate both processes, including through Frankl's "logotherapy" of finding meaning in painful situations. |
Abstract
Shamans and other healing practitioners have used placebos from earliest recorded history to treat those who were ill. As modern scientific theories of disease developed, the use of placebos was considered to be an ineffective and deceptive practice. Later, medical researchers used placebos primarily as an inactive treatment standard against which scientifically based ("real") medicines could be evaluated. However, placebos were discovered to have their own self-healing effects. Spirituality including transcendent experiences also promotes healing effects and recently has been shown to involve neural systems (brain networks) comparable (if not identical) to those engaged in placebo responses. Therapists can facilitate both of these self-healing processes in different ways, including finding meaningfulness in physically and mentally painful situations using Viktor Frankl׳s practice of "logotherapy."