Everybody knows what “placebo” means:
(Wikipedia) A placebo ( /pləˈsiboʊ/; Latin: I shall please) is a simulated or otherwise medically ineffectual treatment for a disease or other medical condition intended to deceive the recipient. Sometimes patients given a placebo treatment will have a perceived or actual improvement in a medical condition, a phenomenon commonly called the placebo effect.
It is not so widely known about a nocebo:
(Wikipedia) In medicine, a nocebo reaction or response refers to harmful, unpleasant, or undesirable effects a subject manifests after receiving an inert dummy drug or placebo. Nocebo responses are not chemically generated and are due only to the subject's pessimistic belief and expectation that the inert drug will produce negative consequences.
In these cases, there is no "real" drug involved, but the actual negative consequences of the administration of the inert drug, which may be physiological, behavioural, emotional, and/or cognitive, are nonetheless real.
Another interesting word “cognitive”. Well, another definition:
(Wikipedia) Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary scientific study of the mind and its processes. It examines what cognition is, what it does and how it works. It includes research on intelligence and behavior, especially focusing on how information is represented, processed, and transformed (in faculties such as perception, language, memory, reasoning, and emotion) within nervous systems (human or other animal) and machines (e.g. computers). Cognitive science consists of multiple research disciplines, including psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, and education.
Well, without going into details and not mentioning NLP and other relevant research I will just mention that it is widely accepted that our mental activity undoubtedly affects our bodies and physiological health. But why this phenomenon is not used? Or, to be correct, not widely used? In any way it is not a competitor for Big Pharma drugs in its scale. In usual pharmacological treatment a patient takes a drug, the treatment can be scaled up and protocolized in such a way that almost everybody can understand how the drug can be used and a patient treated (as soon as a disease was diagnosed and the drug is prescribed). This scheme is successfully commercialized and profited by Big Pharma. In the case of cognitive treatment of let's say a cancer, a patient supposed to be in close contact with a doctor or a specialist in this field of treatment. The main curative effect is provided by not a pill but a service of a specialist in cognitive medicine. Big Pharma in that case is not able to sell anything in a large scale to the cognitively treated patient – the main profits are maid by the specialists providing the cognitive treatment to the patients...
We have some kind of conflict here: Big Pharma (and nobody else) possesses necessary resources for the development of the cognitive treatment but is not able to commercialize it a usual pill-selling way. There are no any other players on this area who could develop the novel cognitive approach. How to solve the contradiction?
Let's make a forecast:
Scenario A:
Big Pharma patents the protocols of cognitive treatment and then licenses out these protocols to hospitals.
Scenario B:
Big Pharma develops novel types of drugs – let me coin a name - “semantic pill”, some kind of mantra, talisman or icon which could provide a desired curative effect by using them in a proper way.
Scenario B sounds very … non-scientific. I do agree, but the placebo and nocebo phenomena are there, they are real and I think and hope that it is a question of time when this scenario will be a standard medicinal procedure. I guess that the futuristic scenario B will be available somewhere 2100-2200. Scenario A is less revolutionary and can be available already 2050 – exactly when we will need it!
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