Healing and the Placebo Effect

    I am getting ready to teach a course at Chautauqua Institute in Upstate New York this summer. The title is "The Body's Mysterious Healing Ability". It is about what behaviors and attitudes may enable one to activate the immune system for healing, including physical healing. The latter is sometimes known as "spontaneous remission", and includes the shrinking of cancerous tumors. When medical professionals observe this happening, they often do not see it as something that could be anything than rare, unrepeatable, or influenced by the human belief system.
    There are obvious theological problems when two people are prayed for in religious healing, and one person gets well, while the other one does not. We probably should not attribute this to a whimsical or punishing God! So the healing is mysterious. But is there something to be discussed here?
    I think, from my reading up to now, that a person's level trust in their doctor or their minister (or some combination, as it appears in numerous cultures in the form of shamanism) determines the effectiveness of prescribed pharmaceuticals. Modern American religion is not likely to get into shamanistic healing, but some who subscribe to different forms of spirituality and humanistic psychology do enact rituals which I have seen personally, and look like a religious practice. The Christian Church has long had a healing ritual of anointing with oil, often in a worship setting.
    There is alternative medicine literature that shows good scientific research on what the general practitioner can do to enhance the immune system when treating patients for a variety of illnesses, including complex diseases. I will show a bibliography later.
   There is a lot of literature on the placebo effect, which touches on a bodily response that often gets in the way of "proper" pharmaceutical research and development. But to see the placebo effect as a positive thing that we might like to encourage and influence is relatively new. Except that in the history of modern American (allopathic) medicine, ANY effectiveness of a prescribed pill before the 1940's was largely based on how the physician prescribed it, that is, what sort of relationship he promoted with his/her patient.
   Non-Western medicine has for centuries already known some things about natural medicines, and how they are "delivered" to the patient. Also the American Indian traditions use physical medicines we would consider odd, as we would consider the rituals odd that accompany them.