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Cause-and-effect thinking: placebo effect CAUSE-AND-EFFECT THINKING: PLACEBO EFFECT
Doctors come to food intolerance with a set of preconceived ideas that automatically prejudice them against the whole concept. And unlike the general public, they are not readily swayed by stories of miracle cures, however numerous those stories might be. This sort of evidence is referred to in medical science as 'anecdotal', and is quite rightly treated with great caution. The human body and mind interact in mysterious ways, and a person may recover from an illness spontaneously, or in response to an entirely ineffective treatment. This is known as the placebo effect. These and other factors make individual case-histories a doubtful item of evidence. Even if diets are helpful in clearing up the symptoms, it may be for some other reason entirely - perhaps the person's previous diet was unsound nutritionally, or contained an unhealthy amount of caffeine or some other drug-like substance that was causing the symptoms.
The history of medicine is littered with bogus 'miracle cures' that apparently worked wonders in their day. Hydropathy, popular in the nineteenth century, was said to be a cure for all sorts of nervous complaints and long-term illnesses. The treatments consisted of alternate hot and cold baths, wrapping the patient in wet blankets, and requiring him to drink huge quantities of water. These measures were supposed to 'strengthen the fibres' of the body and rid it of poisons. 'Direct Faradism' (named after Faraday, who helped to discover electricity) involved giving mild electric shocks to the arms and legs.
It was recommended to anyone who was tired, run down, or had other nervous afflictions. The electric shocks supposedly 'stimulated the constitution'. Both these therapies were highly regarded in their day, and thousands felt they had benefited from them. Mass enthusiasm is a strange thing - simply feeling caught up in some wonderful new discovery may be a powerful form of treatment.
There are various other preconceived ideas that work against food intolerance - the belief that food is essentially passive and innocuous for example, the notion that what we have eaten for thousands of years must be good for us and the simplistic model of digestion which assumes that no complex molecules reach the bloodstream. These mistaken ideas all contribute to the understandable scepticism of the medical world.
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