Covid-19 News

Quote from Navid

Babies need to be fed with spoon. Spoon feeding implies an inability to make a coordinated set of actions that come to a conclusion. You were given enough material to think through to a conclusion.

Viktor Frankl's book talks about how your psychic frame can determine your physical reality. Nothing different in the materiality of their health. Very healthy people died. People with purpose lived. In short, someone who had a "why” for his existence, was able to tolerate any "how." Do we need to connect this like a baby to how there might be a placebo (mind/spirit/belief) effect? We are trying to help raise your consciousness here to what was manifestly obvious for most of human existence.

In 1952, there were not entire libraries saying such things about genes. Just like today, we say the viruses cause illness directly in all cases -- and that doesn't appear to actually be the case (the system is more complex -- it is more about regulation between the immune system and other factors) -- there aren't entire libraries here today.

You are wrong about the placebo effect because what someone believes does change their physical reality. The proof is all over the place. To deny that, is to deny your own humanity. This is the state of the modern mind on display. There is no reason to work hard to show this to you, but think about the perception of pain in hypnosis and what the cancer society says about placebos. Nobody is saying that a placebo effect is going to cure advanced pancreatic tumor.

Good quality research is lacking. The people who are in most of these studies are often not doing the best they can with spirit (are they actively using methods to enact their mind for healing). What are the protocols? Do you really believe that science has probed this question.

The best way to understand mind/spirit/body connection is to realize that it is widely acknowledge that stress is one of the main impacts on disease. The reverse, the reversal of disease is possible and happens regularly but most of medicine ignores it -- thus we are only at the baby step phase of even acknowledging a new paradigm is possible.

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yes if stress is a factor regarding the outcome placebo can have an effect. the truth is probably not in many other cases. I am very stress sensitiv. but learned through breathing techniqes to lower the stress level so much that i can take some serious heated situations and stay clear today. The younger me would have made my brain stop functioning in the same situation. Stress is a very powerful factor worse sleep with it an hence less recovery ontop on its direct hormone influences.

Quote from Navid

Viktor Frankl's book talks about how your psychic frame can determine your physical reality

No it does not!! It can only change your attitude, and how you react. It has no physical effect whatever. You have missed the whole point of his book, and of existential philosophy. What you are describing is a religious notion, or the idea that the mind can affect reality outside brain tissue. That never happens.

Quote from Navid

In 1952, there were not entire libraries saying such things about genes.

Oh yes there were. Such as this one, from 1916:

https://books.google.com/books…q=genetics%201916&f=false

I know there were because we had a shelf full of them in my house, because my mother majored in biology and plant breeding at Cornell.

Quote from JedRothwell

It has no physical effect whatever.

Living and dying seems to be a physical effect as per Frankl. I suggest you learn to skip big statements "you missed the whole point of his book" since you are setting your own traps and then apt to fall in them.

Quote from zorud

Small correction: he claimed "only indoors"

Chinese research shows that very few patients have been infected with the coronavirus outdoors. They looked at hundreds of patients where the probable source of infection was known. They found only few cases of people infected outdoors. People in China all wear masks, both indoors and outdoors, so things might be different in U.S. outdoor locations with crowds of people not wearing masks.

Quote from Alan Smith

“Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.’”

I saw that news report! What a dreadful thing. What a nightmare for the parents. It is unspeakable.

In a sense, just about the whole damn U.S.A. is making the same kind of mistake.

I think I saw that story on CNN. It is here as well:

https://www.usatoday.com/story…y-doctor-says/5422175002/

A similar story:

https://www.usatoday.com/story…d-going-party/5362625002/

Quote from Alan Smith

NOTABLE QUOTABLE

“Just before the patient died, they looked at their nurse and said ‘I think I made a mistake, I thought this was a hoax, but it’s not.’”

Physician Jane Appleby shares the last words of a person in their 30s who died after attending a ‘COVID-19 party’ to catch the virus on purpose. Appleby, a health official in San Antonio, Texas, hopes to raise awareness of the disease in the city, which has 18,000 reported cases.

yea i saw this an first thought about darwin award. Duh we dont do this with flu even. But then I remember a famous tweet about corona hoaxes thingies and decided on first degree murder in stead.

Quote from Navid

Living and dying seems to be a physical effect as per Frankl.

The mind can only affect living and dying by compelling a person to take physical action. For example by searching for food, or saying something, or some other physical act. Your thoughts and attitudes by themselves can have no effect on the any substance other than brain tissue. Along the same lines, there is no evidence that a positive attitude improves the prognosis for illness. There is no evidence that a pessimistic attitude reduces the chance of survival. People think attitude is important, but clinical studies have shown it has no effect. A pessimistic attitude is associated with a poor prognosis or death, but the causality goes the other way. Being very sick makes you depressed. Being depressed does not make you sick, and being upbeat does not help you recover or survive. There is one obvious exception. If you are so depressed you do not take steps to cure the disease, such as going to a doctor or taking your medicine, that may make things worse. But that is not a direct mental effect. It is a mental effect causing you to act (or not act) with your muscles. That is, it causes you to refrain from driving to the doctor's office, or reaching into the medicine cabinet and taking a pill. Mental states can only affect the real world by causing the person to take some physical action. It may be a small action such as talking or taking a pill.

Quote from JedRothwell

The mind can only affect living and dying by compelling a person to take physical action.

The mind can create emotions, which in turn drive hormonal systems in the body - e.g. adrenalin etc. As Stefan said above stress is a real physiological thing with effects (too much is a problem) and it is determined by how the mind interprets the world.

Quote from THHuxleynew

The mind can create emotions, which in turn drive hormonal systems in the body - e.g. adrenalin etc.

Right, okay. Those are physical effects outside the brain tissue, in other organs. I guess I should amend my previous statements.

I meant that mind can have no effect on the world outside the body except by some physical action such as walking, talking, shivering, eating, or what-have-you. There is no spooky influence from the brain to the outside world as far as I know. Also, there is no evidence that attitude can affect prognosis, except by prompting some physical action such as taking your medicine or going to bed. It is widely believed that attitude influences prognosis, but as far as I know serious efforts to find this effect have failed. I think people tend to believe this because they are afraid of not having control over their health. They want to believe: "if I get sick, I can overcome it with positive thinking." Or: "he died, because he had a bad attitude. That won't happen to me." This is blaming the victim. Such notions are common.

This is a purely materialistic, naturalistic view. It may seem to exclude concepts such as the "soul." Not really. I classify the soul as a nebulous metaphenomon. It is presently poorly defined and not understood, so it is no use to science. But it exists in a sense, in some contexts. It is similar to "pathos." That is an emotion or an aesthetic condition too vague to be dealt with by scientific analysis. Perhaps the "soul" or "pathos" will someday come under the ambit of science, to be rigorously defined and measured. I am sure the soul will not have an independent existence outside the body that survives death. That's absurd. It is a metaphenomon, like orderliness, or intent, or evil.

The ambit of science has expanded, and will expand, to what limits we cannot predict. It already deals with things which people predicted it never would, ruthlessly quantifying what people said cannot be quantified. My favorite recent example was from Christian Rudder, one of the founders of the OKCupid dating site and an accomplished social scientist. He described his work as "making the ineffable effable."

Quote from Navid

The best way to understand mind/spirit/body connection is to realize that it is widely acknowledge that stress is one of the main impacts on disease. The reverse, the reversal of disease is possible and happens regularly but most of medicine ignores it -- thus we are only at the baby step phase of even acknowledging a new paradigm is possible.

Traffic noise may kill you - at least predate your live as studies shows. Live/health is not what you think about it's the sum of your environment and how you behave/react.

Quote from JedRothwell

I meant that mind can have no effect on the world outside the body except by some physical action such as walking, talking, shivering, eating, or what-have-you. There is no spooky influence from the brain to the outside world as far as I know. Also, there is no evidence that attitude can affect prognosis, except by prompting some physical action such as taking your medicine or going to bed.

May be you are completely untrained in mind forces. But trained media are able to directly and remotely influence your health. 95% of all illnesses are healed by your mind - will say the knowledge that is stored in your brain.

Some people will laugh about this. It's their way/tactics to deal with the unknown. Possibly these people always need simple answers for simple questions.

My wive always wanted a pill for fighting any symptom she had. But recently she had a nasty dry corona like cough (for days) and after a homeopathic session and 5 globules it suddenly went away. Now what did help ?

Quote from DnG

You're in for a shock~

I doubt it. People have been saying "mind over matter" for centuries. They have claimed there are phenomena such as telekinesis and miraculous faith healing of disease with the power of the mind, and blah, blah, blah. But as far as I know, there is not a single verified instance of these things. Just empty rumors. With millions of cell phones in the world, you would think that by now someone would have recorded hard evidence.

Anyway, if good evidence emerges, I will believe it. It would be okay with me if such things exist after all. No objection. They would be sort of fun. Like x-ray vision. If we invent a gadget to give us mental control over the outside world, such as the robotic arms for quadriplegic patients, or voice input that reads your mind directly instead of listening to your voice, I'd be thrilled. Nature has not given us these powers, but we might give them to ourselves, the way we have learned to fly, or see microscopic life, or the plains of Mars. Science is not magic. It is the extreme opposite of magic, wishful thinking, and faith. But in the last 400 years it has given us more power, freedom, peace of mind, health, knowledge and wealth than the last million years of faith, religion and superstition gave us. It is one of the best things we have accomplished, right up there with democracy, medicine and agriculture. Unless there is a thermonuclear war, in which case it will be the worst thing.

New COVID-19 Prognostic Data

Coronavirus Pandemic Update 95: Widespread Clotting on Autopsy;

The Coronavirus acts in a similar way as the Andromeda strain

Quote from JedRothwell

The mind can only affect living and dying by compelling a person to take physical action. For example by searching for food, or saying something, or some other physical act. Your thoughts and attitudes by themselves can have no effect on the any substance other than brain tissue. Along the same lines, there is no evidence that a positive attitude improves the prognosis for illness. There is no evidence that a pessimistic attitude reduces the chance of survival. People think attitude is important, but clinical studies have shown it has no effect. A pessimistic attitude is associated with a poor prognosis or death, but the causality goes the other way. Being very sick makes you depressed. Being depressed does not make you sick, and being upbeat does not help you recover or survive. There is one obvious exception. If you are so depressed you do not take steps to cure the disease, such as going to a doctor or taking your medicine, that may make things worse. But that is not a direct mental effect. It is a mental effect causing you to act (or not act) with your muscles. That is, it causes you to refrain from driving to the doctor's office, or reaching into the medicine cabinet and taking a pill. Mental states can only affect the real world by causing the person to take some physical action. It may be a small action such as talking or taking a pill.

Two obvious examples

a)

People can have surgery and feel no pain under hypnosis.

b)

Go look up the best treatment based on Cochrane reviews for alcoholism as of March 2020, it has nothing to do with pills or drugs and not even conventional therapy.

There is no real discussion here you are trying to define away vast aspects of human existence as being outside the scope of discussion. You demand mechanism for things that may not have a physical mechanism and then define science as that aspect of things which have a proven mechanism. Meaning your world view of reality is affecting your ability to think.

Inserting arguments about bending spoons with ones mind, is a bombastic over the top request.

Humans clearly have the power to think and create ideas at a pace never seen in nature, and so best to begin the investigation there in seeing what the immaterial can do to the material.

Quote from Navid

a)

People can have surgery and feel no pain under hypnosis.

I doubt it. There are rumors of such a thing, but I do not think there are authenticated examples, and if there were, the person probably would not feel much pain without anesthetic.

People who are traumatized temporarily feel no pain. For example, when a lion catches you and shakes you violently (as all felines do), that anesthetizes you. That is an evolved survival response, giving wounded animals a chance to escape. It may originate in the brain, but it is not voluntary or under control. It is an automatic response, like coughing and spitting up water after you nearly drown. It is possible some technique such as hypnosis taps into a mechanism like this.

Quote from Navid

Humans clearly have the power to think and create ideas at a pace never seen in nature

Nonsense. Gram for gram, our brains are no better or worse than chimpanzee or guppy brains. The only reason we exceeded other animals is that the ratio of brain to body weight is higher, and we can manipulate objects with our hands better. Our advantages originated with our feet first -- bipedal locomotion -- and from there, to the hands, the brain, and then to a smaller gut, from eating cooked food.

Quote from JedRothwell

I doubt it. There are rumors of such a thing, but I do not think there are authenticated examples, and if there were, the person probably would not feel much pain without anesthetic.

Nonsense. Gram for gram, our brains are no better or worse than chimpanzee or guppy brains. The only reason we exceeded other animals is that the ratio of brain to body weight is higher, and we can manipulate objects with our hands better. Our advantages originated with our feet first -- bipedal locomotion -- and from there, to the hands, the brain, and then to a smaller gut, from eating cooked food.

There are textbooks on hypnosis in surgery -- you've just ignored a couple of centuries of historical work. Hypnosis is used today by many women to avoid getting a dangerous epidural. My wife used this and she's a physician. I nominate you for the Town Crier position on this board about Covid, but nothing more.

As for your phrenology about the ratios of brain to body, well let's just say your are uneducated. Lots of reading to do in this conversation - which I'm sure you won't do because your beliefs are impervious to facts.

Quote from JedRothwell

Chinese research shows that very few patients have been infected with the coronavirus outdoors. They looked at hundreds of patients where the probable source of infection was known. They found only few cases of people infected outdoors.

'Only few' != zero, and do you have a link to this Chinese research, please.

Also Navid, what did Cochrane say about the best alcoholism treatment? Searching there just gives an alphabetic list of various treatment options. AA, benzos, etc

People who don't want to wear masks or socially distance have lower cognitive abilities, says scientist:

https://www.sciencedaily.com/r…/2020/07/200710212241.htm

Mask resistance during the Spanish Flu:

https://theconversation.com/ma…cans-were-slackers-141687