Members in the Media
From: CBS News

Inside “60 Minutes” placebo story

CBS News:

Some new scientific research is causing quite a stir in the medical community.

The fight is over antidepressants, and whether they work any better than a simple placebo.

In an report airing this Sunday, “60 Minutes” correspondent Lesley Stahl spoke to the psychologist behind the study, Irving Kirsch, associate director of the Placebo Studies Program at Harvard Medical School.

He says that his research challenges the very effectiveness of antidepressants. Kirsch says the difference between the effect of a placebo and the effect of an antidepressant is minimal for most people.

In her interview with Kirsch, Stahl asks, “You’re saying if (patients taking antidepressants) took a sugar pill, they’d have the same effect?”

Read the full story: CBS News

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Comments

The mysteries of the placebos’ functionality are directly applicable to the expansion of our knowledge of REAL healing (of many maladies), though not towards the bogus “healing” practiced now for the expansion of big-pharma’s profits.
When will it be more deeply studied and grasped just how placebos work? Now that they are again in the public eye will Western mechanistic “science”  “get it”?   Now that yet another study shows the sham of “prozac nation”!?
  The principles of real healing, and the inner workings of placebos,  have been known by ordinary individuals, shamans, all Masters & all genuine healers who have walked the earth.  
Isn’t it time to look far deeper into the core level of what truly heals?  Or would that upset the applecart of a status quo that has increasingly created misery for all of Life?  
 
  The subject of the placebo’s power to affect the physical and mental bodies– and the inherent power of human consciousness in ALL applications– has been my focus for a lifetime.
  This research is NOT groundbreaking whatsoever!!   I am delighted to see this on mainstream news, though it’s been a long time getting to the masses.  

  15 min. of googled research would reveal much about the after-hells that can wait for those attempting to extricate themselves from these legal and highly profitable drugs.  
I have known too many who have been through the dual gruelling challenges of severe depression & anxiety– with exascerbation brought on over time by these “side effects” from the drugs taken to supposedly 
Yes, there’s help sometimes at first, and then…. “oh, we need to up it, need to change it, or whatever…”
No pill can erase or mitigate permanently that which must be experienced fully & come to terms with in one’s journey through life.  
Temporary relief can be life-saving, yes, AND can come thru many  means, however, the so-called “side-effects” I’ve seen with pills are often worse than the original condition, when pills are used  long-term.  
And, the much down-played withdrawl period can be severe, and last far longer than anyone knows upon  commencing these drugs.
In these times, depression, “add, adhd”, etc are ramapant for many REASONS. A bit of reflection would show what these reasons are–and I feel it’s not just the individual who manifests pathology, but society as a whole is skewed–away from any genuine happiness, love, compassion, or truth-telling. As always, the micro & macro-cosms reflect each other. And the current “epidemic” of so-called “bi-polar”, as well as other big dis-eases, (ie addictions, obesity, add, adhd, “rage disorder” etc, (yes, even “restless leg syndrome”–ha!) is but a mirror. Inevitable by-products of a staggeringly misdirected race.


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