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Keynote Address by:

Anne Harrington, PhD
Professor and Chair
of the History of Science Department
Harvard University

Keynote Address: "Faith, Healing and the Placebo Effect"

If the placebo effect can produce “real” healing, what does this mean for religion and faith? Do the rites and symbols of religious belief function for the faithful as potent placebos – similar to sugar pills and syringes filled with saline water, and with as little real substance? Or is there more to say?  Are humans “wired for God” because, in the course of human evolution, believers in God were able more effectively to evoke the placebo effect (and recover from illness) than nonbelievers?  Or, again, is there more to say? What about prayer? If we want to prove that its effects are “real,” don’t we have to prove that the placebo effect could not have played any role? Or, is there another way to think about this?

In this conference, I aim, not so much to answer these kinds of questions, as to show where they have come from, and why we are asking them now in the ways that we are. Several historical touchstones – late 19th-century medical and Catholic attempts to account for the power behind the healings at Lourdes; early 20th-century secular and religious debates over the real power behind the “power of positive thinking” – will act to frame and deepen our ability to engage with the issues in our own time.

Author of:
The Cure Within: A History of Mind–Body Medicine
Medicine, Mind, and the Double Brain
Reenchanted Science

Editor of:
The Placebo Effect
The Dalai Lama at MIT

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Agenda

8:00 Registration

8:30 Welcome – Marsha D. Rappley, MD, Dean, MSU College of Human Medicine

8:40 Keynote Address: Faith, Healing & the Placebo Effect – Anne Harrington, PhD, Professor and Chair, History of Science Department, Harvard University

9:45 Respondent – David Addiss, MD, MPH, Senior Program Officer, Fetzer Institute, Inc.

10:40 Interdisciplinary Panel/Discussion: Panelists: David Kozishek, MA., BCC (Panel leader); Janet Osuch, MD; Michael J. Boivin, PhD, MPH; Tom Tomlinson, PhD; Edward Rosick, DO, MPH, DABHM; E. James Potchen, MD, JD, MSc; Issidoros Sarinopoulos, PhD, MS

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For more information, contact:

Bethany Ford
Phone: (517) 884-0454
E-mail: bethany.ford@hc.msu.edu
Fax: (517) 355-7700.

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Sponsored by Michigan State University Department of Family Medicine and the Center for Ethics and Humanities in the Life Sciences.