A viewer asks: “While placebos themselves are inactive, the mind’s response to the belief in treatment can be powerful enough to initiate healing. The placebo effect is believed to work via a combination of psychological, neurological, physiological, and social mechanisms. Is the placebo mechanism one of stimulating the brain to release natural painkillers that reduce pain, improve mood, and create a feeling of well being? Could healthcare provision be improved by utilizing patient perception of factors such as bedside manner, confidence, compassionate care, formality of receiving pills, and even the appearance of tablets in order to influence the brain’s pain pathways, reducing the sensation of pain or even symptoms?” What is Creator’s perspective?

You have summarized a number of suspected and well-established variables and correlations with placebo effects resulting from the nature of what one encounters and experiences. There, indeed, are physiological changes that can be measured scientifically and have created a mechanistic explanation, as far as it goes, for what is observed in the measurably improved responses of people exhibiting the placebo response to appropriate positive stimuli that give encouragement and support and create an expectation of benefit. The kinds of inner changes that can be measured involving chemical mediators, for example, are evanescent, and this is characteristic of the placebo response, that it is typically short-lived; it is a set of circumstances providing a temporary reassurance but, if there are serious problems underway, that level of response will not be sufficient to maintain or achieve deep protection from adverse symptoms and other consequences of illness or injury. Your explanation also leaves out the possibility of divine intervention reducing inner negativity or inducing positive changes within the being, energetically, that might translate into a tangible and perceived benefit like pain reduction. Being a private matter, and given that the medical mainstream is largely comprised of nonbelievers, or at least functions as nonbelievers in what they do and how they think on the job, there has not been a serious assessment, in a careful way, to truly establish what can be done through divine partnership in gaining many benefits to well-being. The divine is limited as well in the extent of what it can offer, and many times this will be a short-term benefit as well because long-term and deep healing requires deep karmic repair, in most cases, and that can take a considerable length of time, and become a source of doubt, and will not be appreciated if a patient finds relief, eventually, which might well be due to answered prayers. Most clinical trials attempting to document the effects of prayer cover too short an interval, by far, to document what might truly happen through appeals for divine assistance.