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

The Meaning Response, 'Placebo' and Methods

In 2002, Dan Moerman outlined three candidate explanations for the "placebo response": the "conditioned stimulus-response," Irving Kirsch's "response-expectancy" explanation, and the "meaning response." The meaning response, Moerman argued, was the only one of the three candidate explanations that could cover all the data, gained from decades of RCTs and centuries of historical record. Moerman went so far as to propose replacing the term "placebo effect/response" with the term "meaning response," because people are not responding to placebos, since there is nothing to respond to; people are responding to meanings. There is evidence of medically significant meaning responses where there is no evidence for conditioning. Similarly, there is evidence for such responses where those subject to them lack the knowledge—epistemic capital—required to form the beliefs which might constitute an expectation. Something else, neither conditioning nor propositional attitudes, explained placebo responses, and Moerman proposed the meaning response. While the authors consider the meaning response to avoid the pitfalls of conditioning and response-expectancy, it has been subject to criticism. The criticisms have focused on what is seen as the explanation falling foul of the naturalistic demand and not fitting with prevalent predilections in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. This article seeks to allay these worries and proposes the inclusion of ethnomethodological fieldwork in future research

The medicinal flora of Majouri-Kirchi forests (Jammu and Kashmir State), India

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/30218/1/0000610.pd

A philosophical analysis of the evidence-based medicine debate

BACKGROUND: The term "evidence-based medicine" (or EBM) was introduced about ten years ago, and there has been considerable debate about the value of EBM. However, this debate has sometimes been obscured by a lack of conceptual clarity concerning the nature and status of EBM. DISCUSSION: First, we note that EBM proponents have obscured the current debate by defining EBM in an overly broad, indeed almost vacuous, manner; we offer a clearer account of EBM and its relation to the alternative approaches to medicine. Second, while EBM proponents commonly cite the philosophical work of Thomas Kuhn and claim that EBM is a Kuhnian 'paradigm shift,' we argue that such claims are seriously mistaken and unduly polarize the EBM debate. Third, we suggest that it is much more fruitful to understand the relationship between EBM and its alternatives in light of a different philosophical metaphor: W.V. Quine's metaphor of the web of belief. Seen in this way, we argue that EBM is an approach to medical practice that is indeed importantly different from the alternatives. SUMMARY: We can have a more productive debate about the value of EBM by being clearer about the nature of EBM and its relationship to alternative approaches to medicine

Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS) : design and first-year review

This article describes the motivation, design, and progress of the Journal of Open Source Software (JOSS). JOSS is a free and open-access journal that publishes articles describing research software. It has the dual goals of improving the quality of the software submitted and providing a mechanism for research software developers to receive credit. While designed to work within the current merit system of science, JOSS addresses the dearth of rewards for key contributions to science made in the form of software. JOSS publishes articles that encapsulate scholarship contained in the software itself, and its rigorous peer review targets the software components: functionality, documentation, tests, continuous integration, and the license. A JOSS article contains an abstract describing the purpose and functionality of the software, references, and a link to the software archive. The article is the entry point of a JOSS submission, which encompasses the full set of software artifacts. Submission and review proceed in the open, on GitHub. Editors, reviewers, and authors work collaboratively and openly. Unlike other journals, JOSS does not reject articles requiring major revision; while not yet accepted, articles remain visible and under review until the authors make adequate changes (or withdraw, if unable to meet requirements). Once an article is accepted, JOSS gives it a digital object identifier (DOI), deposits its metadata in Crossref, and the article can begin collecting citations on indexers like Google Scholar and other services. Authors retain copyright of their JOSS article, releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. In its first year, starting in May 2016, JOSS published 111 articles, with more than 40 additional articles under review. JOSS is a sponsored project of the nonprofit organization NumFOCUS and is an affiliate of the Open Source Initiative (OSI)

Space Charge at Nanoscale: Probing Injection and Dynamic Phenomena Under Dark/Light Configurations by Using KPFM and C-AFM

International audienc