crapping rainbows in your brain

My mind is fucking BLOWN!

OK, so, I'm reading this article about the "nocebo" effect -- a sort of negative placebo...  Like how voodoo hexes can cause people to get ill.  Or this guy was told he had a few months to live, and died in the allotted time, but the cancer didn't spread as they expected.

Anyways, they talk about the role of expectation:

What is becoming clear is that these apparently psychological phenomena have very real consequences in the brain. Using PET scans to peer into the brains of people given a placebo or nocebo, Jon-Kar Zubieta of the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, showed last year that nocebo effects were linked with a decrease in dopamine and opioid activity. This would explain how nocebos can increase pain. Placebos, unsurprisingly, produced the opposite response.

Meanwhile, Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin Medical School in Italy has found that nocebo-induced pain can be suppressed by a drug called proglumide, which blocks receptors for a hormone called cholecystokinin (CCK). Normally, expectations of pain induce anxiety, which activates CCK receptors, enhancing pain.

So I look up Proglumide on Wikipedia:

Proglumide also works as a placebo effect amplifier for pain conditions. When injected visibly to a subject, its analgesic effect is bigger than a similarly administered placebo. When injected secretely, it doesn't have any effect, whereas standard pain drugs have an effect, even if they are administered without the subject's awareness ^[11]. The supposed mechanism is an enhancement of the neural pathways of expectation.

Dig that?

This drug, by dealing with the pathways of expectation makes it so it works greater than a placebo when the patient thinks it's being administered.  However, if they don't know it's being administered it has no effect.  All because of the fact it targets the "expectation pathways" (CCK receptors in the first article's mention of it). 

How fucking cool is that?

So...  Could this drug actually be used as a placebo for other purposes?  That is, say you want to work on something involving willpower, but lack it, and inject the drug, thinking it will work, and because it DOES work on the expectation centers ACTUALLY increase your willpower?  Or does it only work on pain relief?  If so, is there a chance that this CCK system could be used to amplify the ability of the mind/body to control itself in ways beyond pain management?

Just a brief note here, on which i hope to further explicate in my blog.

I've read animal rights by  peter singer.  it's fairly convincing, the basic thesis is that the primary consideration for "right of life" is the right to be free of pain, thus any entity that can feel pain has an inherent right and desire to avoid that pain.

he's an anti-vivisectionist for this reason.  animal medical research is cruel torture to animals, breeding strains of creatures  predisposed to certain things(ie: cancer), so that they can try new therapies on them.

his arguments are persuasive, and for the most part i agree.  however, i just read an article today about research where they stripped the outer shell of HIV and attached another viral coating that attaches it to cancerous sells, and that there's indication that this is a potential approach.  they tested this on lab mice.

i think of this, and it's hard to reconcile this with my overall  view of animal liberation.

perhaps the best moderate view would be one that eliminates as much animal testing as possible save for medical necessity... Of course, any superficial(ie: cosmetics, etc...) purposes should be banned, and if there are ways to test(ie: computer models) that can replace animal testing, it should be used.

it's a good question of where to draw the line...