Originally Posted by AdamBrown
The goal of fitness training is not to achieve a temporary state of strength and flexibility that is present when you do the exercises and then vanishes during the rest of the day. The goal of fitness training is to gradually increase your baseline of strength and flexibility. In other words, the purpose of fitness training is not to create certain temporary states in your body, but rather to develop certain abiding traits in your body.
So my question regarding to this is, is lifeflow like steroids or some drug that boost one's results?
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Adam,
When you speak of placebo there's a decided negative connotation, as though a placebo effect is false and therefore has no lasting value. This is a common misconception. We use placebo effects all the time. They're so deeply ingrained into the fabric of our lives we scarcely even recognize them for what they are. Here are a couple of things for you to think on.
A Brujo (a male witch) down in the jungles of Argentina is approached by a father who claims his daughter's honor has been violated by a young man from a neighboring village. He wants his daughter's assailant killed as punishment. So he pays the Brujo the requisite fee and off the Brujo goes to the neighboring village where he locates the hut of the young man in question.
The Brujo is wearing the skin of the jaguar as a robe with the animals head (or the skin of it) covering most of his own head. In his hands he holds a sacred rattle which he shakes in a very particular rhythm. He builds a small fire and dances around it, chanting words and phrases that are the specialty words used by the Brujo. He does this for several hours right outside the hut of the young man. At the end of his dancing he shouts in a loud voice that the young man will be dead in three days, then he leaves.
A day passes, the young man is fine. Then another passes; still no problem. On the morning of the third day a cry is heard from within the young man's hut. The mother of the young man has found her son stone dead in his bed, just as the Brujo's curse suggested he would be.
We of the West look down our noses at this and say, "Obviously the young man was superstitious and frightened, and his own fright probably triggered a heart attack or a stroke or something. It's nothing. Just primitive superstition. Really? Does that tagging a label of "superstition" on it actually explain anything?
Ajahn Brahm is a Buddhist monk working in Australia. Much of his work has been to visit people who are in hospice facilities so he has been around death a great deal. He reports that time and again he has watched the following scenario play out, and many Oncologists (doctors specializing in the treatment of cancer) have assured him they have noted the same thing.
A patient will go to their doctor for a checkup and the doctor will tell them, "I have bad news for you. You have such-and-such a form of cancer and we need to treat it immediately and aggressively. I won't lie to you, the prognosis for this kind of cancer is not good but we'll do everything we can."
A few weeks or a couple of months later the person is dead. They went to their doctor having no symptoms or complaints of cancer and shortly thereafter they die from it. The autopsy reveals in many instances that the cancer in question has been in their body for a long, long time; years, sometimes decades, just quietly doing not much of anything, and the patient never even knew it was there. But the instant they are made aware of its presence and they're told how serious it is, they begin to exhibit all the symptoms modern medicine tells them they should be having and then, as modern medicine dictates is usually the case, they die from it.
The doctor wore no jaguar skin robe, but he did wear a professional white lab coat. He shook no rattle, but around his neck was a stethoscope and in his pocket were tongue depressors and other medical paraphernalia. He didn't dance around any fire, but he did run in and out of the room, ordering various tests while poking and prodding the patient in different ways. He didn't chant the mystical words of a Brujo but he did speak to the patient in unfamiliar, medically specialized phrases such as "metastases" and "cytotoxic" and "neutropenia". And he never cursed the patient to die in three days but he may well have discussed with the patient the statistics for surviving this kind of cancer, and given the patient some indication of how long a person typically lived after diagnosis when suffering from it.
We call what the Brujo did mere superstition, but we call what the Oncologist did "modern medical treatment". As Ajahn Brahm notes, there is precious little difference between these two things. That patient had lived years with a normal quality of life until told they had cancer, then all of the sudden everything spiraled down and out of control and shortly thereafter they were dead. They didn't die of cancer so much as they died from fear and their belief that the cancer was going to kill them. Or, put another way, their belief invoked the placebo effect in a way that was detrimental rather than helpful. Far from being some "temporary" state, the placebo effect can be quite permanent as noted by the fact that people can die from it (that's pretty permanent) as evidenced by the two cases cited above.
In my family and extended family about every third person is a doctor, most of them specialists. I hear accounts like this all the time. I recall one case in which a woman was suffering from some terminal condition (I don't recall what it was off hand but I believe it was some form of cancer) and she was invited to participate in the clinical trial of a new drug. She was told that in previous trials the drug had shown remarkable promise. She started in on the trial and her condition improved remarkably, so much so that her condition was deemed to have gone into full remission. It remained this way with continuing improvement for several months. Then her doctor told her that there had been some kind of error in the previous trials of the drug. Rather than showing great promise as a treatment it was now clear the drug had been totally ineffective. Immediately, and I mean as in that very day her symptoms began returning, her condition took a turn for the worse and in very short order she succumbed to it and died.
At first glance you might think that her initial progress was due to the placebo effect, while her subsequent downturn was because the placebo effect was taken away. In fact what happened is that she simply substituted one placebo effect (the positive one in which the drug was effective) for a completely opposite placebo effect (in which the drug was useless). Both were placebo or rather, both were due to the power of belief that was set in motion by a placebo. The first placebo was a treatment thought to be effective, the second placebo was a treatment thought to be totally ineffective. In either case it was the belief of the patient that made the difference. The placebo simply determined what that person's belief was, positive, or negative.
The question is, exactly how does the placebo effect do what it does? The precise mechanism is not known. What is known is that the placebo itself is not the "cause" of the changes. It acts simply as a catalyst that invokes physical and/or psychological, emotional faculties inherent in each of us. These faculties are quite real and as far as can be determined, almost limitless in their scope of application.
Does Lifeflow work on physiological principles? Absolutely. Entrainment is a mechanical phenomenon based on harmonic resonance. Strike a tuning fork at the pitch of E and hold it next to a piano string that is also tuned to the pitch of E and that piano string will entrain to the vibrating tuning fork and start vibrating itself. The piano string does not begin vibrating because it "believes" that's what it should do. There's no placebo in that. It's a mechanical object responding to a principle of physics. Lifeflow employs that same mechanical principle of sympathetic resonance.
But is there also placebo effect taking place using Lifeflow or other brainwave entrainment programs? Absolutely, and we should all be happy there is. To the degree that a person couples the physical effects with the placebo effects Lifeflow becomes an even more powerful tool. Someone who is an abject skeptic about brainwave entrainment and is certain it is nothing but pseudo-science, New Age clap-trap, is likely to experience little or no benefit from it. Their hostile and antagonistic attitude is likely to act as its own negative placebo effect that overrides any physical effect the entrainment program might have to offer. They are like a person who is so certain they're going to die from cancer that they do, even though their cancer might be of a kind that is effectively very treatable.
The best approach to take if you're uncertain is to be neutral. There is plenty of evidence that it works. If you read over this forum you will read all kinds of reports about people who are making tremendous progress in various areas of their lives. Take those as your evidence that maybe there is something to it after all. With that possibility open, try it. There's a free and fully functional sample you can use. It doesn't cost you anything to try it out and see for yourself. The best evidence is always the evidence you experience for yourself.
Is using Lifeflow going to give you a temporary improvement that will vanish away in time? Not likely, unless you employ negative placebo effect to counteract its positive effects. The only one that can control that is you.
