Showing Tag: "placebo" (Show all posts)

Franz Mesmer (1734-1815) believed that there was a magnetic force or "fluid" within the universe which influenced the health of the human body. He experimented with magnets to influence this field and so cause healing. By around 1774 he had concluded that the same effects could be created by passing the hands, at a distance, in front of the subject's body, referred to as making "Mesmeric passes." The word mesmerize originates from the name of Franz Mesmer; and was intentionally used to separa...

Skeptics point out the difficulty distinguishing between hypnosis and the placebo effect, proposing that the state called hypnosis is

[...] so heavily reliant upon the effects of suggestion and belief that it would be hard to imagine how a credible placebo control could ever be devised for a hypnotism study.^[5]"

However, hypnotism itself originated out of very early placebo controlled experiments, conducted by Braid and others. Many researchers and clinicians would therefore object that hyp...