Interesting research and news

[Echo2099]

Here are couple of news items from the UK today, if allowed and anyone is interested.

http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-sussex-34659771

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/technol...atment-6731754

Also some press for MS:

http://www.aopa.org/News-and-Video/A...-South-America

[hunterd]

that is very interesting, thank you for sharing this.

[jreagan70]

The major thing that the MS patient's experience with HIV drugs tells us is that her rapid improvement is due to something other than an influence on the major mechanism of MS damage. We know that nerve cells don't magically remyelinate in a mere 2 or 3 days -- particularly in people who have had disabilities for years -- and dead nerve cells don't come back to life in any amount of time.

A rapid improvement in walking in only a few days must, then, come from some other mechanism. It would be most beneficial to find out what that those other mechanisms are.

And it can't be overlooked that one of the possibilities is the simple placebo effect. The placebo effect has been shown to be responsible for improvements in people's symptoms and conditions a minimum of 30% of the time. In some studies, the placebo effect was shown to be responsible for improvement in 70 to 90% of cases. That's stunningly remarkable.

So another area of study could be how the placebo effect alone can cause improvements in MS symptoms in spite of how serious people's physical damage -- and corresponding disabilities -- are believed to be. And then a study of how the improvements caused by the placebo effect can be harnessed and used intentionally to lead to improvements without other kinds of interventions, which can, themselves, cause harm.

It's important to note here that the placebo effect is an unconscious phenomenon. So all of the protests that the placebo effect can't be real because a person isn't responsible for causing their own disease or its symptoms have already been scientifically disproven. The effects that a person's beliefs and expectations have on their symptoms don't imply or prove that the effects are in any way intentional. And that, to me, is what makes the phenomenon so interesting and potentially beneficial.