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09/02/2001 Archived Entry: "Television"

There's an extremely interesting looking programme on TV tonight called 'Testing God' - all about the issue of God and religion in an increasingly scientific world. I don't expect to hear many new arguments from the programme - after you've read the talk.origins newsgroup for a few weeks, you become an expert in all the arguments and refutations used in the Creationism and Creation Science debates. But it's still good to see this sort of thing on television. It's the first of a three part series and is on Channel 4 at 8PM.

[This also happens to overlap with The Right Stuff on Sky Cinema, which annoys me no small amount since I've always wanted to watch that movie. Sure, I can use a VCR but ideally I'd have like to tape both. Well, never mind, I can always buy the movie on DVD.]

I've been thinking a little about a discussion I had last night that began with homeopathy. Homeopathy, in a nutshell, involved the dilution of allergy-inducing substances in water where the water is taken by the allergy-sufferer. The theory goes is that the minute quantities of the allergen 'immunises' the sufferer against it in future. The problem is that the dilutions used in homeopathy are such that in the end water sample you only have a few molecules (if any!) of the allergen and certain not enough to do anything at all.

I forget who brought it up (probably me, after I got too excited about some related subject) but then I dismissed the whole thing as a placebo and then went to the toilet. When I came back I explained that, yes, of course placebos had a measurable and often positive effect on patients but in the end they were placebos and probably the agents of change were the results of hormones or other chemicals secreted from the brain that bolstered the immune system.

Then someone said something interesting - imagine if you're a terminally ill patient and you've tried all the scientific remedies possible for your illness and they haven't worked. You're a scientific person and you know that homeopathic medicine is a placebo. Nevertheless, you take it. Will it make any difference?

I replied that the answer depended on your mental state at the time, because that's what placebos really rely on - if you don't believe that the placebo is going to help you, it probably won't. But, I wonder, can a scientific individual who knows rationally that it is a placebo ever believe that it will help them? It's like trying to get two things for one.

Anyway, all of this reminded me today of an article I read a year or two ago about how researchers conducted an experiment where they gave patients a valid and proven medicine, and then they asked them to visualise their immune system physically attacking the illness (whatever it was) - imagining the phagocytic white blood cells engulfing the foreign particles and the T cells releasing antigens to neutralise them. From what I recall, the patients who visualised the process fared better than those who didn't, statistically speaking. Which definitely puts an interesting spin onto the whole psychological impact of healing debate.