Neuroscientists Discover Shamanic Healing

Post Reply
anonymousmags
Forum Member
Forum Member
Posts: 1
Joined: Tue Jul 22, 2014 11:35 am

Neuroscientists Discover Shamanic Healing

Post by anonymousmags »

Better late than never is a good thing, even if the delay is measured in many thousands of years. Western medical science is just now discovering that the mind is powerful and placebo works.
Shamans have implicitly known this since they began ritually treating patients perhaps 40,000 years ago, during the Upper Paleolithic transition. In fact, one of the better hypotheses regarding the adaptiveness of invisible agent-agency ideas (improperly called “religion”) revolves around shamanic placebo healing. In Wondrous Healing: Shamanism, Human Evolution, and the Origin of Religion (2001), James McClenon contends that what we today call “religion” evolved because ancestral humans who believed in spiritual healing powers had a much greater chance of actually being healed. These differential healing effects, even if statistically minor at any given time or place, become enormous over evolutionary time.

Read More : http://www.anonymousmags.com/neuroscien ... c-healing/

Procel
Forum Member
Forum Member
Posts: 87
Joined: Fri Jul 18, 2014 1:05 pm

Re: Neuroscientists Discover Shamanic Healing

Post by Procel »

So, how is it that toxic medicinal treatments discovered within the last 50 or 100 years are 'conventional medicine' and herbology, acupuncture and other treatments that have been healing people for a thousand years or more are 'alternative medicine?'

Great article. Thanks for the link,

maldor
Forum Member
Forum Member
Posts: 17
Joined: Sun May 03, 2015 10:46 am

Re: Neuroscientists Discover Shamanic Healing

Post by maldor »

They have not just discovered the placebo effect?

McClenon was suggesting how this effect could be used in modern medicine. His point was that some people respond much better than others to the placebo effect and if we could somehow use this in a broad practical sense.

User avatar
michael4343
Forum Member
Forum Member
Posts: 24
Joined: Tue Jul 07, 2015 8:30 am

Re: Neuroscientists Discover Shamanic Healing

Post by michael4343 »

Hey,
I think maybe we should remember that a lot of shamanism revolves around the idea of spirits, so unless modern science is able to develop a device which can talk to inanimate objects or one which can talk to a incorporeal being which is capable of answering intelligently, shamanism remains unproven globally.

Post Reply

Return to “Shamanism”