Is there medical evidence of “faith healing”?
A. Try a placebo, the most potent drug known and with the fewest side effects, says Peter Smith, pharmacologist and neuroscientist at the University of Alberta. “But you have to believe in it.” Placebos are inert substances, often used in “double- blind” studies–neither researcher nor subjects know who’s taking the real medicine–to rule out imagined effects. And powerful these effects are: the pill-taker hopes the pill will work and so, mysteriously, it does–even though pharmacologically, it shouldn’t! “I don’t know of any studies that have fully explained this,” says Dr. Smith. Possibly anxiety and despair suppress the immune system, then the hope-giving placebo bolsters the body’s natural defenses to help fight off injury, infection, cancer, says Reg Morgan, physiologist at the University of Western Australia. The same mechanism may assist doctors with “a good bed-side manner.” Q. Guys, at a sperm bank, would your type be in hot demand? A. If you’ve got movie-star looks, you’ll ap
