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Due to the recent explosion of placebo research at many levels the Editors believe that a volume on Placebo would be a good addition to the Handbook of Experimental Pharmacology series. In particular, this volume will be built up on a meeting on Placebo which will be held in Tuebingen (Germany) in January 2013, and where the most prominent researchers in this field will present and exchange their ideas. The authors who will be invited to write chapters for this volume will be the very same speakers at this meeting, thus guaranteeing high standard and excellence in the topic that will be treated. The approach of the book is mainly pharmacological, including basic research and clinical trials, and the contents range from different medical conditions and systems, such as pain and the immune system, to different experimental approaches, like in vivo receptor binding and pharmacological/behavioral conditioning. Overall, the volume will give an idea of modern placebo research, of timely concepts in both experimental and clinical pharmacology, as well as of modern methods and tools in neuroscience.
Psychodynamic psychotherapy and psychoanalysis have had to defend themselves from a barrage of criticisms throughout their history. In this book David Jopling argues that the changes achieved through therapy are really just functions of placebos that rally the mind's native healing powers. It is a bold new work that delivers yet another blow to Freud and his followers.
Do antidepressants work? Of course -- everyone knows it. Like his colleagues, Irving Kirsch, a researcher and clinical psychologist, for years referred patients to psychiatrists to have their depression treated with drugs before deciding to investigate for himself just how effective the drugs actually were. Over the course of the past fifteen years, however, Kirsch's research -- a thorough analysis of decades of Food and Drug Administration data -- has demonstrated that what everyone knew about antidepressants was wrong. Instead of treating depression with drugs, we've been treating it with suggestion. The Emperor's New Drugs makes an overwhelming case that what had seemed a cornerstone of psychiatric treatment is little more than a faulty consensus. But Kirsch does more than just criticize: he offers a path society can follow so that we stop popping pills and start proper treatment for depression.
Organized into five parts, this book represents his major ideas and studies regarding infant-adult interactions, developmental processes, and mutual regulation."--BOOK JACKET.
Based on a meeting in November 2000, this book brings together researchers from a wide range of disciplines to examine the biological, behavioral, social, cultural and ethical aspects related to the placebo effect. Perspectives on the necessity for including a placebo in randomized clinical trials will also be examined. This is the first attempt to examine the evidence-base of the placebo effect and will provide important information for clinicans.
This book is the second of the series about the imperatives for the search for new psychiatry. As stated in my recent 2021 book about: The Search for New Psychiatry, current psychiatric practices have failed many: patients and their families, their doctors and the society at large. That was the end of the 2021 book and the beginning of this book as a follow up in search for pathways to a new and more effective science-based practice Based on its major contributions to the recent successful and expedient development of the Covid 19 vaccines, I am proposing the same pathway of using the new revolution in informatics as the way to save and secure the future of psychiatry and that is what I am recommending in this book reaping the benefit of AI and Big Data Analytics but with a wide open eye on its limits, reliability, risks, unforeseen or unintentional harms. Part Two of the book deals with a number of perineal and also new challenges that continue to require better understanding and resolution. Among the phenomenological and nosological challenges, the recent development by Neurology of its subspeciality of Behavioral Neurology in competition to Neuropsychiatry, is reviewed in terms of an opportunity for integration of the tow subspecialities towards the creation of a new third field of “Clinical Neurosciences”. Other challenges included are: The Subjective /Objective Dichotomy, Lunacy and the Moon- reflections on the interactions of the brain and environment and Woke Psychiatry, what is it? Several other clinical challenges include: The Past is Coming Back as The Future -The Rise, Fall and Rise Again of Psychedelics, Loneliness as the silent disorder and several other challenges. At the end, a postscript has been hastily added in memory of a close friend, a pioneering psychopharmacologist but above all an empathic humanist, Professor Thomas Arthur Ban or as he always preferred, Tom.
The brain can be weighed, measured, scanned, dissected, and studied. The mind that we conceive to be generated by the brain, however, remains a mystery. It has no mass, no volume, and no shape, and it cannot be measured in space and time. Yet it is as real as neurons, neurotransmitters, and synaptic junctions. It is also very powerful. —from Brain Wars Is the brain "a computer made of meat," and human consciousness a simple product of electrical impulses? The idea that matter is all that exists has dominated science since the late nineteenth century and led to the long-standing scientific and popular understanding of the brain as simply a collection of neurons and neural activity. But for acclaimed neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, Ph.D., along with a rising number of colleagues and others, this materialist-based view clashes with what we feel and experience every day. In Brain Wars, Dr. Beauregard delivers a paradigm-shifting examination of the role of the brain and mind. Filled with engaging, surprising, and cutting-edge scientific accounts, this eye-opening book makes the increasingly indisputable case that our immaterial minds influence what happens in our brains, our bodies, and even beyond our bodies. Examining the hard science behind "unexplained" phenomena such as the placebo effect, self-healing, brain control, meditation, hypnosis, and near-death and mystical experiences, Dr. Beauregard reveals the mind's capabilities and explores new answers to age-old mind-body questions. Radically shifting our comprehension of the role of consciousness in the universe, Brain Wars forces us to consider the immense untapped power of the mind and explore the profound social, moral, and spiritual implications that this new understanding holds for our future.
