cure/placebo

Went to pick my first blackberries of the season today.  Conditions were less than ideal after three days of predominantly rain, but today dawned bright and sunny.  So I went out to a stretch of footpath where I regularly see the brambles and have seen the berries ripening, but where I rarely encounter people.  Should be ideal, right?

Alas no, very poor pickings.  Evidently someone, or more likely several people, got there first   Had to wade right in to the scrub to get anything half-decent.  As I got stung and shredded (a regular seasonal hazard – serves me right for wearing sandals/shorts/t-shirt) I saw another plant regularly associated with brambles and nettles: dock leaves.  And a recollection came to me from my distant childhood: dock leaves are supposed to bring relief to nettle stings and rash.

It’s a distant recollection, but they never did bring relief to me.  Over time I reached the age when one bears that level of pain in silence (hey, it’s one of the few slightly-macho things a boy can still do in our emasculated society), and learned of the placebo in biology classes.  The dock leaf is a classic placebo, right?

I don’t know where medical science stands on that one: a very quick google finds both views (not including any authoritative-looking reference).  But nettles and dock leaves surely feature in every English childhood, right?  Can a child’s reaction to dock leaves tell us anything about their personality?  Can it predict how they’ll respond to placebo, including variants such as faith-healing, in treating more serious ailments?  Or on the other hand, how they’ll respond to medically-proven remedies.  And if a correlation can be established, can that be extended to throw any light on ‘alternative’ medicines that may or may not be more-than placebo?

Hey, add some fieldwork and rigorous statistics, and this could be developed into a PhD thesis.  I expect it’s been done, but you never know!

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