Dateline: Brownsville International Airport, the Very, Tippy End of Texas.
Probably my older sister is the one who let out the secret ingredient found in vanilla. If not, I’m sure I’m blamed the missing bottle of flavoring on her like I did most everything. Learning that vanilla contained a lot of alcohol, my eleven-year-old hoodlum friends and I decided to have a party. The vanilla coke bonanza came with a drawback. While baker’s vanilla smells wonderful, an actual full teaspoon taken at once brings on the gag response. But, no worry. We were determined to experience intoxication. We got around the taste by dissolving the teaspoon of vanilla into quart-sized glasses of Coke and ice. And we all “became” rolling-around-on-the-floor smashed….Right.
“Which is more important? The world as it exists? Or the world you THINK exists, the one you are making up and responding to?”
Well, of course, our lives are determined more by the twisted reality we’ve made up than the actual facts. How else can we account for gamey first marriages or engagements, and the fact that we only wear the front ten percent of the clothes in our closets?
We humans are reality creating machines. The next several entries will focus on easy-to-see ways our responses are determined by an environment constructed to satisfy our fears and hopes.
When a person who is into voodoo is given a curse, he or she is more likely to fall ill. But, responding to a distorted world isn’t always bad. A couple of decades ago, when ADHD was young, the distractibility of children was attributed to either sugar or preservatives in the diet. Later the connection was disproved. And yet, the children whose mothers’ monitored what they ate actually improved. The act of monitoring in some way lent a placebo effect.
Many studies have demonstrated that pain can be somewhat relieved when the patient is given a sugar pill believed to be a narcotic. The “medicine” is even more effective when you tell the patient, “We have to be careful not to give you too much of this drug. It’s very powerful.”
Personally? I’m all-happy an into placebo meds. Let’s take headache medicine. I walk right past the Walgreen’s knock-off stuff every time. I’m an expert and I’m not falling for cheap imitations of the real “super” medication. I pay four times as much for Excedrin. And not just any Excedrin either. I hunt down the best, most effective pills. There was a day when I settled for the plain white pills. But, I’m not sticking with an old model when a new, more effective tablet comes out. No more pansy white pills once the green capsules , the Express Gels, hit the shelf. Now, who wouldn’t want relief as fast as possible?
And then, just when I’d found the pinnacle of pills, these geniuses of headache relief marketing came out with bright red capsules with the white stripes! My chronic inflammatory diseased fingers felt better just holding the bottle. Oh, what’s that you say? The ingredients are the same? Pa-shaw.
Tomorrow. The Placebo Hotel Room….What Emotional Decisions Passing for “Thoughts” Direct Your Actions?…continues.
