These quacks were never the first choice for the ill person, but after the conventional/established medicine’s interventions have all failed and established medicine basically shrugs and says “we don’t know what this even is”, and gives up on you, it makes sense to keep going anyway and try wackier things.
I think this is relative to your base rates on how the world works in general. Guy that uses herbal concoctions based on some wacky theory of chakras? Sure, he may have empirically stumbled upon something that does work and just doesn’t understand why. Homeopathy or prayer? No chance, that’s just plain placebo.
I have not gotten prayer to really work for me yet, but I’ve experimented with it a bit (I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but yeah I’ve gotten desperate enough and have thought I was possibly going to die on multiple occasions now and have entered mental states where I think praying might be the only thing I can do).
“Prayer” in the sense of “ask for a thing in your head and then the thing happens in real life” is obviously not going to work. But I think this may be the wrong way to think about prayers/praying (disclaimer: I am not religious at all and never was, so I have no idea what I’m talking about). Anna Salamon has an old post where she talks about “useful attempted telekinesis”, and I think this may be one valid way to make sense of praying. Repeatedly and vividly visualizing the things you value/the things you want may magically make it easier to get that thing, at least some of the time. Another way to think about it might be as a dual to gratitude journaling: in gratitude journaling you examine what you value/don’t value in terms of what you already have, whereas in prayer you examine the same things in terms of what you don’t currently have. (Why should the latter work? Shouldn’t it just lead to envy/sour grapes/bitterness about your life? Yeah, I don’t know. Anna’s post talks about useful vs harmful telekinesis and I think there’s possibly a lot to explore here.)
Praying combined with chanting + rocking may be even more effective, because the latter two have some shot at directly affecting your physiological state. I’ve not really gotten chanting to work for me, but rocking sometimes calms me down a little bit.
Homeopathy: yeah, agreed, not sure what’s going on here and hope that I don’t have to get to the point of trying it out.
I think you can formalize that kind of thing as some form of meditation or mindfulness or whatever, without involving a religious aspect that implies external entities that obviously (well… most likely. I have to leave that technically > 0% chance open) have nothing to do with it.
As for homeopathy, I feel as confident as can be that absolutely nothing is going on there other than a lot of people either deluding themselves into peddling magic potions, or straight up being con-men. The supposed “theory” behind homeopathy is one of the things that make the least sense in the long history of things that don’t make sense.
I think this is relative to your base rates on how the world works in general. Guy that uses herbal concoctions based on some wacky theory of chakras? Sure, he may have empirically stumbled upon something that does work and just doesn’t understand why. Homeopathy or prayer? No chance, that’s just plain placebo.
I have not gotten prayer to really work for me yet, but I’ve experimented with it a bit (I feel somewhat embarrassed to admit this, but yeah I’ve gotten desperate enough and have thought I was possibly going to die on multiple occasions now and have entered mental states where I think praying might be the only thing I can do).
“Prayer” in the sense of “ask for a thing in your head and then the thing happens in real life” is obviously not going to work. But I think this may be the wrong way to think about prayers/praying (disclaimer: I am not religious at all and never was, so I have no idea what I’m talking about). Anna Salamon has an old post where she talks about “useful attempted telekinesis”, and I think this may be one valid way to make sense of praying. Repeatedly and vividly visualizing the things you value/the things you want may magically make it easier to get that thing, at least some of the time. Another way to think about it might be as a dual to gratitude journaling: in gratitude journaling you examine what you value/don’t value in terms of what you already have, whereas in prayer you examine the same things in terms of what you don’t currently have. (Why should the latter work? Shouldn’t it just lead to envy/sour grapes/bitterness about your life? Yeah, I don’t know. Anna’s post talks about useful vs harmful telekinesis and I think there’s possibly a lot to explore here.)
Praying combined with chanting + rocking may be even more effective, because the latter two have some shot at directly affecting your physiological state. I’ve not really gotten chanting to work for me, but rocking sometimes calms me down a little bit.
Homeopathy: yeah, agreed, not sure what’s going on here and hope that I don’t have to get to the point of trying it out.
I think you can formalize that kind of thing as some form of meditation or mindfulness or whatever, without involving a religious aspect that implies external entities that obviously (well… most likely. I have to leave that technically > 0% chance open) have nothing to do with it.
As for homeopathy, I feel as confident as can be that absolutely nothing is going on there other than a lot of people either deluding themselves into peddling magic potions, or straight up being con-men. The supposed “theory” behind homeopathy is one of the things that make the least sense in the long history of things that don’t make sense.