Some say placebos are so powerful they cure almost anything, while others say they barely work. To sceptics, believing in placebos is as irrational as filling the gas tank of your car with Earl Grey tea“ and thinking it will […]
We feel good when we do a good deed, so there must be a psychological benefit to helping others? But how can we know for sure? The best way to study the health benefits of kind deeds is to look […]
A doctor and a lawyer were talking at a party, but they weren’t having fun because people kept interrupting to tell the doctor about their health problems and ask for free medical advice. After a while, the annoyed doctor asked […]
Cure sometimes, treat often, comfort always – Hippocrates The story of Quesalid This is a true story. A hundred years ago a boy called Quesalid lived on Vancouver Island. He had a feeling that shamans tricked people, but he […]
In the early 1970s psychologist Dr. David Rosenhan from Columbia University did a crazy experiment. He took a group of eight ‘normal’ (whatever that means) people, and sent each one to a different psychiatric hospital where they pretended to hear […]
“At any given moment, you have the power to say: This is not how the story is going to end.” – Christine Mason Miller In 2013 Angelina Jolie had her breasts removed after she found out she had a breast […]
Man cannot live by bread alone Clifford and Eva Vevea were ‘hopelessly in love’ for 65 years of marriage and died within hours of each other. Marcus Ringrose died the day after his wife’s funeral. Robert and Nora Viands died […]
Vertebroplasty is a fancy name for making a small cut in someone’s back then injecting bone glue (cement) into a vertebrae that has been damaged. It is used to treat the growing number of people with back pain: in 2003 […]
You have an amazing body. This is true whether or not you think you have the kind of body they take pictures of to put on magazine covers. In any case the pictures on magazine covers aren’t real – they […]
Or is it? We often hear that some things are ‘just in the mind’. The body, on the other hand, is separate – a physical thing. From this point of view it sounds downright wacky to think that beliefs can […]