If you take an African witch doctor with hours of trance dancing and plenty of chicken blood, it is probably all placebo.<p>Both for someone of the same tribe, who has been brought up in the same belief system, having been taught to look at the doctors in awe, a dramatic treatment by a witch doctor probably is tremendously powerful.<p>My guess is that it will be much more powerful than mindfulness meditation. (And this is regardless of what is attempted treated - (self-reported) pain from a hot prick or the common cold.)<p>In others words; the self-healing&#x2F;self-suggesting effects that we call placebo has something to do with belief; and probably belief in a broad sense, whether the subject believes, whether the doctor believes and whether the surroundings in general believes.<p>In a way things like mindfulness meditation is part of the &quot;folk-religion&quot; of the modern man. Read any women&#x27;s magazine &#x2F; self-help book and it will tell you that mindfulness, positive thinking, biodynamic food and exercise has strong effects on your physical, psychological, sociological, even financial well-being.<p>Most of this is not science. But some science supports of the claims.<p>I think that a good question for science to ask is &quot;has these things always been true?&quot; Are they deep physiological facts or are they changing over time, over culture?<p>The study summary mentions that the effect of the cream was 10%. The cream I suppose was made to look like traditional western medicine applied by some kind of nurse or doctor.<p>Suppose this experiment had been done in the 50es where skeptism towards Western medicine was much lower and a doctor&#x27;s authority was much stronger. Would the effect be same? My guess is it would be stronger.<p>Likewise maybe saying a prayer worked better for the believing Christian Western man of 200 years ago than the modern &quot;scientific&quot; techniques of positive thinking, mindfulness etc. would have.<p>How would you crack this in a scientific experiment?<p>It is probably very hard because the experimenter&#x27;s beliefs also comes into play. Double-blind is one way to go about this but for what is examined here it is probably not possible to do effectively. And secondly the subjects would be affected by what they believe works and already know about.<p>Maybe a simple place to start would be to ask the subject (and the experimentor) if they believe the treatment would work? And maybe survey general attitudes towards traditional medicine, alternative medicine, meditation, health etc.