>>suggestion is a powerful psychological tool, which works, and these therapies rely on suggestion.

Yes, but with caveat.

They demonstrated this again (same program) with a girl with a very rare disease, that required medicine that was difficult to dose properly, and too much could be dangerous for her to take. She was stable on a certain dose of this med but the docs wanted to cut it back a little bit. They created a very complicated "ritual" for her to set up an association, that involved where she took it, a rose petal scent that she sniffed with each dose, and some other stimuli. Eventually they weaned her to half the dosage of the med along with the ritual, and her body responded as if she was still taking the full dose.

HOWEVER this was not a controlled experiment. The docs have no way of knowing if the ritual really made any difference. It is possible that if they had just cut the medicine to half with no other prep, that might have been sufficient dosage for her.

The demonstation was not meant to show that this "works" it was just a way of pointing toward some outside-the-box thinking and some interesting research. The part with the mice, where they were able to observe physical changes in the bodies of the mice, showed that you can't just dismiss these things as being nonsense. That's a long long long long long way from saying eating fish heads will cure cancer, diabetes and arthritis if you "believe" it will.

So I want to point to downsolong's post again and remember that there can be serious negative consequenses for some of these things... from neglecting "accepted" treatments in favor of false hope, to the idea that some of these peddlers wares might actually do real damage to the body.

But the interesting part to me is the verification that "state of mind" can and does play a vital physical role in maintaining the bodies health AND in healing from illness ALONG with proper treatment from qualified doctors.