Resonance, placebo effects, and Type II errors: some implications from healing research for experimental methods.

Background: Classical experimental design presupposes that subjects, randomly separated into experimental and control groups, are independent and distinct. Treatments given to the experimental group ought to have no effect on the control group, which functions as a baseline to illustrate “what otherwise would have happened.” Any change in the control group is often labeled an “anomaly.” Examples of these types of anomalous phenomena can be found in placebo research, which often shows proportional unexpected and unexplained changes in control subjects. In four previously reported experiments on anomalous healing using “healing with intent” on mice injected with lethal doses of mammary adenocarcinoma (source, The Jackson Laboratories, Bar Harbor, ME; code, H2712; host strain, C3H/HeJ), a high percentage of both experimental and control mice exhibited an anomalous healing pattern, most often passing through stages of tumor ulceration to full life-span cure. Objective: In order to explain tumor regression of ...