scholarly journals The Neuroscience behind the Mechanism of Placebos: Placebo Effect

Author(s):  
Preksha Sharma

The science behind any kind of medical treatment is oriented around the effects of the psychology of humans with the corresponding therapeutic mechanism of the treatment. The human mind and its psychology is always an interesting and complex matter of discussion for researchers. The human mind is so powerful that it is even capable of healing the mental and physical health of the human body. To study this psychological concept of a healing mechanism, the Placebos effect is studied. This paper discusses the placebo effect and the physiology neuroscience involved in the whole concept of the Placebos and its mechanism. Because the placebos and its mechanism are so powerful that it is capable of even manipulating the human mind and the body as well the study discussed all the facts in an evidential manner.

Author(s):  
Kirti Mishra

In this time of novel coronavirus (COVID-19) when everyone is looking for the right treatment and the vaccine a psychological effect can really help make the situation better at homes. There is no doubt in an ideology that the human mind is a compelling tool and so powerful that it is well aware about the concept of placebo effect. It somehow convinces the human body that the placebo medication given in the procedure is equivalent to the proper Medication.  This paper aims to analyses the placebo effect in curing the pain and its role in curing the symptoms of the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) because it is possible that this method may have healed the body of COVID patients. This has been done by considering the related experiments and researches of placebo effect. In this paper conducting the online survey which is help to find the placebo effects on the COVID-19 Patients and taking their opinion towards it and 280 patients for using as a sampling which help to find the approximation of placebo effect on COVID-19 patient. The influences of the placebo effect on the medical business and COVID treatment both have been highlighted. A discussion in futuristic sense about the placebo effect in treatment of COVID-19.


2018 ◽  
Vol 73 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sam Goodman

Abstract This article considers the significance of eating and drinking within a series of diaries and journals produced in British colonial India during the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The discussion of food and drink in this context was not simply a means to add color or compelling detail to these accounts, but was instead a vital ingredient of the authors’ understanding of health and medical treatment. These texts suggest a broader colonial medical understanding of the importance of regulating diet to maintain physical health. Concern with food, and the lack thereof, was understandably a key element in diaries, and in the eyewitness accounts kept by British soldiers, doctors, and civilians during the rebellion. At a narrative level, mention of food also functioned as a trope serving to increase dramatic tension and to capture an imagery of fortitude. In references to drink, by contrast, these sources reveal a conflict between professional and lay opinions regarding the use of alcohol as part of medical treatment. The accounts show the persistent use of alcohol both for medicinal and restorative purposes, despite growing social and medical anxieties over its ill-effects on the body. Close examination of these references to food and drink reflect the quotidian habits, social composition, and the extent of professional and lay knowledge of health and medicine in colonial British India.


1996 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 357-370 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. F. Stalley

It hardly needs to be said that the parallel between mental and physical health plays an important part in Plato's moral philosophy. One of the central claims of the Republicis that justice is to the soul what health is to the body (443b–444e).1 Similar points are made in other dialogues.2 This analogy between health and sickness on the one hand and virtue and vice on the other is closely connected to the so–called Socratic paradoxes. Throughout his life Plato seems to have clung in some sense to the ideas that justice is our greatest good, that the unjust man is correspondingly miserable and that no one is therefore willingly unjust. It follows from these ideas that the unjust man, like the sick man, is in a wretched state which is not of his own choosing.


Author(s):  
С. С. Бескаравайний

The article discusses the analogies between the formation of humanity as a collective subject, and the modern process of forming artificial intelligence, which should also have the features of a collective subject. It is shown that attempts to rely solely on the study of individual intelligence are unproductive. The isomorphism of anthroposociogenesis and the creation of AI is motivated by the following: AI is created by human civilization - therefore, its thinking will reproduce both the features of individual intelligence and the features of civilization that ensure the socialization of the individual. The problem of copying consciousness is difficult to analyze, therefore, the formation of subjectivity is considered. A technosubject is a collection of devices and programs that can determine their own future. It has been established that the bio-genetic law acts as a vector for the evolutionary variability of technical devices and sets the boundary conditions that must be met in the process of becoming a techno-subject. Copying the process of the emergence of the human mind and at the same time the practice of society in the accumulation and processing of information shows the path of development. Since now all functional mechanisms of the development of the mind and consciousness have not been revealed, it is necessary to correlate the new, computer mind with the form, with the external manifestations of the previous, natural, intelligence. There are also differences between these processes: 1) in comparison with the formation of human intelligence, the formation of AI is more reflexive, conscious, 2) the fundamentally different physicality of AI, due to the transfer of a large amount of information between machines, 3) the formation of techno-subject can be completely different in speed, since the learning ability of neural networks can exceed the learning ability of a person. Now, technological structures for storing information that we perceive in a socio-technological context can become elements of the body of a new subject. The Internet of things shows the possibility of a fundamentally new physicality, and communications in it are equivalent to unconscious biochemical processes in the human body. At the same time, copying the forms of the human body is redundant, but copying of manipulators and robot operators that can interact with the infrastructure created by man is necessary. It is shown that the Internet as a whole, as a single system, in modern conditions cannot become an AI carrier, it is more a medium than a subject. The carriers of AI should be the structural units of the technosphere, which will become the spokesmen of those contradictions that are sources of development. Probably, these will be technocenoses that will strive to achieve autotrophy, which will require extremely clear goal-setting from them, and, as a result, will lead them to the status of a techno-subject.


2014 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Woelert

AbstractThis paper explores some of the cognitive-ecological dimensions of various manual forms of tool use occurring among human agents. In particular, it clarifies what such forms reveal about the intentionality of the human mind. Integrating phenomenological, philosophical and anthropological findings and perspectives, I argue that there exists not one but at least three different forms of operative types of intentionality that are associated with three specific forms of manual technical activity. First, there is the direct type of operative intentionality that realizes itself through a human agent’s concrete bodily movements. Second, there is a materially mediated form of operative intentionality, which is required for performing those technical activities where the external tool directly extends the movements of the human body. Third, there is a more complex variety of such materially mediated intentionality, which underpins those forms of tool use where the dynamics of the tool and those of the body significantly diverge. It is suggested that the relation between these three forms of operative intentionality is best conceived in terms of a structural hierarchy.


Author(s):  
Don Garrett
Keyword(s):  
The Body ◽  

Spinoza’s central doctrines in Part 5 of the Ethics include the following: (1) there is in God an idea of the formal essence of each human body; (2) because this idea remains after the death of the body, a part of the human mind is eternal; and (3) the wiser and more knowing one is, the greater is this part of one’s mind that is eternal. Each doctrine seems to be inconsistent—indeed, each in two different ways—with the rest of Spinoza’s philosophy. Resolving these apparent inconsistencies requires an understanding of Spinoza’s theory of formal essences and its connection to his theories of intellect and consciousness. This chapter explains, for each doctrine, (i) why it must be attributed to Spinoza; (ii) why it seems difficult to reconcile with the rest of his philosophy; and (iii) how an understanding of his theory of formal essences can resolve the apparent inconsistencies.


Author(s):  
Ewa Malchrowicz-Mośko ◽  
Dariusz Wieliński ◽  
Katarzyna Adamczewska

The aim of this study was to investigate perceived benefits for mental and physical health and barriers to horseback riding participation among professional and amateur athletes by gender. The empirical study of 2651 professional and amateur horseback riders was conducted during the last edition of Cavaliada competitions (held in Poznan in December 2019)—one of the biggest and most important horseback riding events in Europe. A diagnostic survey method was used in the study. In the questionnaire a division of benefits and barriers according to the EBBS (Exercise Benefits/Barriers Scale) was used. The results are presented by means of frequency distributions for individual items. The verification of hypotheses about the differences between the analyzed groups was conducted using the U-Mann Whitney test with a correction of tied ranks. For the compared groups the mean rank values were calculated. Research results showed that respondents rated the positive impact of equestrianism on mental health higher than on physical health. Among the barriers, the most frequently mentioned aspects were not related to the internal motivation of the respondents, but to external factors—money, time and distance of sports facilities. Men rated the social and psychological benefits higher, while women rated the positive impact of equestrianism on physicality. Professionals rated more highly a number of aspects related to positive effects on the body, while amateurs claimed that were more often not supported by loved ones. This is important research from the point of view of horseback riding promotion. Understanding the horseback riding benefits and barriers are needed, as such knowledge can be used to encourage horseback riding. Perceived benefits and barriers to horseback riding have so far been rarely studied by researchers.


2001 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 331-347 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lisa Klepac Lockhart ◽  
Jamila Bookwala ◽  
Angela Fagerlin ◽  
Kristen M. Coppola ◽  
Peter H. Ditto ◽  
...  

The current study had two primary goals, to determine whether: 1) self-rated mental and physical health, pain, and experience with health problems were predictors of elderly adults' attitudes toward death; and 2) death attitudes predict end-of-life medical treatment concerns. Participants were 109 adults, 65 years of age and older ( M=78.74 years), recruited from the local community. Regression analyses indicated that poorer perceived physical health predicted a greater likelihood of viewing death as an escape, and poorer perceived mental health predicted a greater fear of death. Viewing death as an escape and fearing death predicted end-of-life medical treatment concerns; a greater endorsement of either attitude predicted more concern. Possible explanations for the links between perceived health, attitudes toward death, and concern about end-of-life issues are suggested.


2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 197-213
Author(s):  
Murat Göç-Bilgin

This article aims to analyze Douglas Coupland’s Microserfs with a deliberate emphasis on posthuman theory, body politics, and gender to construe the transformation of the human body, human-machine nexus, and captivity in inhumanity with a struggle to (re)humanize minds and their bodies. One of the arguments of the paper will be that posthumanism offers a new outlet for breaking the chains of captivity, that is, escaping into non-human to redefine humanity and to emancipate the human mind and human body to notch up a more liberated and more equitable definition of humanity. As gender and sex are further marked by the mechanical and mass-mediated reproduction of human experiences, history, and memory, space and time, postmodern gender theories present a perpetual in-betweenness, transgression and fluidity and the dissolution of grand narratives also resulted in a dissolution of the heteronormative and essentialist uniformity and solidity of the human body. Gender in a posthuman context is characterized by a parallel tendency for reclaiming the possession of the body and sexual identity with a desire to transform the body as a physical entity through plastic surgery, genetic cloning, in vitro fertilization, and computerization of human mind and memory. Therefore, the human body has lost its quality as gendered and sexed and has been imprisoned in an embodiment of infantile innocence and manipulability, a “ghost in the machine,” or a cyborg, a hybrid of machine and organism (Haraway). The human-machine symbiosis, then, is exteriorized and extended into a network of objects switching “natural human body” to an immaterialized, dehumanized, and prosthetic “data made flesh.” In this regard, Coupland’s Microserfs boldly explores the potential of posthuman culture to provide a deconstruction of human subjectivity through an analysis of human and machine interaction and to demonstrate how human beings transgress the captivity of humanity by technologizing their bodies and minds in an attempt to become more human than human.


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