I don’t disagree with anything anyone is saying but what about the placebo effect? That is a recognized effect where someone’s belief in something can effects the outcome. So much so that all drugs trials have to be double blind to make sure it doesn’t affect the data….

Right. I’m not dismissing the power of the human mind, at all. We virtually create our entire experience of reality. The sense we make of reality totally changes where we stand in relation to it. But we don’t have complete control. Noel Edmonds recently said to a cancer sufferer that she should have just done more positive thinking or something like that, and it hit the news. Now, I’m not arguing that having relaxing, positive and powerful ways of looking at the world and making sense of reality don’t have an influence. They have a very, very large influence. They’re just not the be all and end all, we can’t choose everything that happens, because we are surfing the waves of life and those waves are complex and go far beyond each individual. There’s way too many variables involved to think we can just control everything and choose every outcome. We seriously can’t. As for illness, maybe it’s just in the genes, or environmental or what we ate, or whatever. Complex biological factors. And that’s why Noel Edmonds comes across to me as being so insensitive … and he may have a shock if he comes across a serious illness himself, one that does not appear to have its origin in, or even a relationship to, any “negative thinking”.

• This reply was modified 8 years, 6 months ago by Rock Banana.