NB ongoing work …
Placebo: The word Placebo is wrongly understood as “just sugar pill”-effect, which may be a very small part of the real biopsychosocial-cultural conceptualization many, as I, use! Pharmacological interest may prefer sugar pill preventing competence within the field of medicine – where pills is extremely questionable especially in life style medicine fields. But this does not prevent extensive pharmacological use (not of human carefulness), not seldom together with lack of proper biopsychosocial medicine examinations (references will come here).
Hypnos: As I see it Hypnosis need to be considering human brain evolution and particular interplay between spatial/Limbic and verbal/rational dual code processing. Also, different kind of way to prepare its interplay with connection with earlier state dependent constructs influence on on-going processes. In particular hypnosis may be of great importance in the development of effective psychophysiological based placebo!
Time and communication considerations: Fast changes are mostly (can be too complex processes preventing) easy to observe as well as also fast to return to pre-stimuli levels. But if we would have very slow processes preventing observation (if not careful followed with effective measurements) which leads to substantial effects? Spontaneous recovery is an expression often trying to explain something (e.g. changes suddenly observed) we do not understand as well as regression towards mean actually do not explain at biopsychosocial ideographic levels, which is what counts in clinical work. Why I bring this up is that if we understand more about the psychophysiology of placebo as well as hypnosis integrating human evolution paradigm, we might be able to identify crucial “factors”/mechanisms which, independent of “speed” are central to the real psychophysiological placebo process, which probably have both nomotetic and ideographic features – enabling to develop a first step towards a biopsychosocial placebo toolbox where probably hypnosis may be one of some crucial tools.
Where we shall not neglect old wisdom by e.g. Hippocrates: “The doctor’s task* was thus to ensure that the body would be able to heal itself”. https://www.institutoeticaclinica.org/wp-content/uploads/A-history-of-the-placebo.pdf but where we now some years later may be ready to try to gradually improve our knowledge base enabling brining the place phenomena into a scientific and clinical practical useful context and a part of the modern medicine, where skills before pills (www.skillsbeforepills.com) will be a humanity contribution making priority for care before profits!
* NB task, not talk, as we understand communication today in a still limited way is verbal/rational/mostly conscious and spatial/limbic/not often conscious including internalization also in adults as well as how it is “sent” as well as (conscious and not conscious) received – a complex process we assume is what occur in human communication, which is of great interests in hypnosis. Something which might occur also in internal speak?
Now to the draft – main focus of this page
As I see it Hypnosis need to be considering human brain evolution and particular interplay between spatial/Limbic and verbal/rational dual code processing. Also, different kind of way to prepare its interplay with connection with earlier state dependent constructs influence on on-going processes. In particular hypnosis may be of great importance in the development of effective psychophysiological based placebo!
The psychophysiology of placebo (as well as nocebo) concerns human brain and its complex ways to cross-talk with our psychobiological systems when it concerns different kind of dysfunctions.
Much is discussed about different kinds of learning as well as different kind of reasoning (e.g. critical education, e.g. Thales (Summarized of the paradigm used by Bo von Schéele | Biopsychosocial Medicine – NB in Swedish = Vetenskap | Stressmedicinsk Centrum (stressmedcenter.com) but not much about placebo (and nocebo) out of an evolutionary point of departure of human development including Triune Brain https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triune_brain as well as Dual-coding theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-) coding_theory#:~:text=According%20to%20Paivio%2C%20there%20are,is%20used%20to%20represent%20information.&text=Both%20visual%20and%20verbal%20codes%20can%20be%20used%20when%20recalling%20information
NB I do not discuss details here, only have the links above as indication of (a) we need to consider the evolution of human and especially human brain as a gradually extension over million of years – as Zimbardo said – a house jerk. Reptilian, Limbic Mammalian were human brain is the last step – so far – and we have to be aware and consider this impossible possibility we are equipped with! Hard? But, that is where we have to deal with. The good news is that we do have survived thanks to ability to process incomplete information, which is not the case for old computers.
So, in spite of lack of knowledge about how spatial and verbal systems interplay as well as with more basic reptilian brain (in humans), we do need to try to incorporate it while it is apparently what is the foundation of human mental information processing in general and particular.
The great challenge in medicine is the explore/understand/practically use normative approaches and tailored its applicational tools into individuals prerequisites/biological expressions/needs/…
To be able to do this we need to have an effective knowledge base from where we extract creative innovative practical ways to approach our mission; to see medicine as art of healing and not pills! Also we need not only to finds practical applications but also ways to falsify data and validate individuals clinically.
Impossible? Maybe, we at least we need at last to invest all we can to approach step by step a solution, where I do think that the increased understanding of the placebo as well as the nocebo process – in general and ideographic individually play an decisive role!