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I learned to get a handle on hondling — the Jewish art of the deal — from my late, great uncle Shayke, z"l. He was a master. I remember begging him not to walk out the door after a storekeeper refused his offer.
But the door didn't close before the storekeeper called him back and agreed.
Shayke was more than a shrewd shopper, though. I don't want to risk offending anybody with geographic stereotypes (even though a study reported in Perspectives on Psychological Science said that "geographical placement is a good predictor of psychological characteristics". But with little schooling, Shayke was a guerrilla psychologist. His wheeling and dealing was so well honed that, he could use it on himself. He hardly ever got headaches.
(Which reminds me of the old line, "I don't have ulcers. I give them.")
But on the rare occasion he had a headache, he would pantomime taking two aspirins, and it would go away.
It was my first experience of mind over matter.
Back when I was writing advertising for a mail order company, one day I was drinking decaffeinated coffee.
(It was before a fast day and I was weaning myself off caffeine. Now, because of AFib, my doctors have me on permanent immoderate moderation.)
As I drank the denatured coffee, I noticed something weird. Even though I knew it had no caffeine, it still gave me a lift. Somehow, whether because of the taste or the ritual, it gave me some of the feeling of a real cup of coffee.
If you're thinking placebo, we're on the same page.
Suddenly it hit me. Eureka! I was the Louis Pasteur of snake oil. I discovered that a placebo can work even if you know it's a placebo.
I told the mail order company's lawyer about my discovery and said that we should start selling placebos.
He came back with a characteristically cautious response:
"You're nuts!"
I told him to stick to his area of expertise. I knew this was a leap of faith from his regular work of reining in my sweepstakes promotions. And it barely passed his stomachache test.
(If something I wrote gave him a stomachache, he knew it was illegal.) Still, he was intrigued enough to ask a patent lawyer.
Sure enough, the patent lawyer thought I was right.
But before the selling came the research. I dove in and became a virtual doctoral candidate in placebology.
At one point, the patent lawyer told me that the mass of documentation I sent him was impressive, but the key point of whether a placebo works if you know it's a placebo still needs more research. Then he added, "But I know that telling that to you is like telling a kid he has to eat more ice cream."
I love ice cream, in a manner of speaking. And I went back into the fray.
Not so simple. Who is going to finance research that could show you don't need to buy drugs? Certainly not the drug companies.
That was way before Ted Kaptchuk of Harvard Medical School ran a study showing that patients who knew they were taking placebos reported twice as much symptom relief as a no-treatment group. He called them "open-label placebos."
At that time the only solid research I could find was a 1963 experiment run by Lee Park and Uno Covi of Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: "Nonblind Placebo Trial; An Exploration of Neurotic Patients' Responses to Placebo When Its Inert Content Is Disclosed."
Park and Covi selected 15 neurotic outpatients at a psychiatric clinic and carefully worked with a prepared script, which read in part: "Many people with your kind of condition have also been helped by what are sometimes called ‘sugar pills,' and we feel that a so-called sugar pill may help you, too."
Then, just to be sure, the script explained that a sugar pill "is a pill with no medicine in it at all. I think this pill will help you as it has helped so many others. Are you willing to try this pill?"
Fourteen of the patients agreed. All of them showed improvement. One refused. Her symptoms later increased.
In a 1957 Pogo cartoon, a pelican named Roogey Batoon was selling snake bite remedy. No snake bites? No problem. He carried a snake for unbitten customers. Roogey opened his case and out came Snavely with a top hat … and an expression that said he was feeling no pain.
"Snavely! Is you been at the remedy again?"
"Hotcha! I bit myself, Boss ... it was a case of life or worse."
But it goes deeper than a serpent's tooth. Norman Cousins referred to the power of positive emotion as "the biology of hope and the healing power of the human spirit." Hope and faith can actually change biology.
Centuries before Dr. Freud put the Viennese crunch in craziness, we knew that the mind matters. Maimonides (d. 1204) rules that we don't believe a person who confesses to a murder. He might be bitter and suicidal and just want to use the court to kill himself. Maimonides
Scripture (Deuteronomy 7:15) says, "The Divine shall remove from you all disease; and all the evil maladies of Egypt … He shall not place upon you, but He will set them on all your enemies."
The Torah Temimah quotes the Jerusalem Talmud, in which Rabi Eliezer ben Yaakov says disease comes from a person worrying so much that it "becomes like a yoke on his shoulders and destroys his body and spirit."
On the other hand, the Tzemach Tzedek (d. 1866 ) says, "Tracht gut vet zein gut — Think good, and it will be good."
That's not just a slogan. It's a force of nature. It's for real.
And it's not sugar coated.
Minds matter.
(COMMENT, BELOW)
Mordechai Schiller is an award-winning columnist and headline writer at Hamodia, the Daily Newspaper of Torah Jewry, where this first appeared. His column has won two awards -- so far -- from the American Jewish Press Association.
Previously:
• Conclusions are risky landing sites. They're never safe to jump to
• Are Jews really hardwired to be miserable?
• The Time Machine
• One big happy dysfunctional family
• Why Pay Less If You Can Pay More?
• Are We Having Font Yet?
• Why Smart People Do Dumb Things
• There is nothing so sad as a stupid Jew
• Asking For It