Priestess, Mother, Sacred Sister: Religions Dominated by Women

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/136378/1/ae.1997.24.1.218.1.pd

Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Distinguished Lecture: Consciousness, “Symbolic Healing,” and the Meaning Response

Symbolic healing, that is, responding to meaningful experiences in positive ways, can facilitate human healing. This process partly engages consciousness and partly evades consciousness completely (sometimes it partakes of both simultaneously). This paper, presented as the Society for the Anthropology of Consciousness Distinguished Lecture at the 2011 AAA meeting in Montreal, reviews recent research on what is ordinarily (and unfortunately) called the “placebo effect.” The author makes the argument that language use should change, and the relevant portions of what is often called the placebo effect should be referred to as the “meaning response.”Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/93714/1/anoc1061.pd

Examining a Powerful Healing Effect through a Cultural Lens, and finding Meaning

In this paper I argue that the "placebo effect" doesn't exist; placebos do, but they are inert so they have no effects (that's what "inert" means). Yet we know that often enough, things do happen after placebo administration. Among various causes for such change, I attribute some effects to the meanings the placebos convey to the participants in the medical event — the doctors, nurses, patients, family, community, etc., of the patient. I call these "meaning responses," and survey here some of the ways they occur (with or without the presence of placebos). Then, I describe some recent studies which dramatically complicate the interpretation of RCTs, and our perhaps overly simplistic understandings of the nature of medical efficacy

The meaning of baldness and implications for treatment

Use of therapies to improve an individual's appearance is not a new medical concept. Androgenetic alopecia has been recognized as a disorder since the time of Hippocrates,1 and since that time, a variety of preparations and surgical procedures have been used as treatments. Recently, both the popular press and the professional literature2 have given much attention to the antihypertensive agent minoxidil for treating androgenetic alopecia. Treatment of alopecia raises a number of interesting questions regarding the definitions of "disease" and "illness," some of which have implications for practitioners as they define the limits of proper medical practice.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/27109/1/0000101.pd

Symbols and selectivity: A statistical analysis of native american medical ethnobotany

Native Americans use a wide range of plants medicinally. Many of these plants have profound meaning to their users. Does this mean, as some assert, that tribal medicine is "all placebo"? Since the essential character of meaning is the arbitrariness of the sign, then insofar as this medicine is symbolic, the plants used medicinally will be a random representation of plants available in nature. Several regression analyses of plants used by native Americans on plants available to them indicate substantial selectivity in plant use. Native American medical ethnobotany is not only placebo medicine.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/23587/1/0000549.pd

Interface to high-performance periodic coupled-cluster theory calculations with atom-centered, localized basis functions

Coupled cluster (CC) theory is often considered the gold standard of quantum-chemistry. For solids, however, the available software is scarce. We present CC-aims, which can interface ab initio codes with localized atomic orbitals and the CC for solids (CC4S) code by the group of A. Gr\"uneis. CC4S features a continuously growing selection of wave function-based methods including perturbation and CC theory. The CC-aims interface was developed for the FHI-aims code (https://fhi-aims.org) but is implemented such that other codes may use it as a starting point for corresponding interfaces. As CC4S offers treatment of both molecular and periodic systems, the CC-aims interface is a valuable tool, where DFT is either too inaccurate or too unreliable, in theoretical chemistry and materials science alike