I've been doing a bit more research. There are still traditional shamans around today and they perform a very important role in their societies - healing. Depending on the the culture, shamans can have expert knowledge of medicinal plants but they use a lot of ritual while acting as 'doctor'.
I found a very interesting article in the Harvard Magazine - The Placebo Effec t - An ingenious researcher finds the real ingredients of “fake” medicine.
Back in the dim and distant past when there wasn't much in the way of medical treatment, the shamans' rituals could have acted like a placebo. "... the survival value of the kind of brain which manifests itself as religious belief under the right circumstances" could be something to do with Paleolithic patients who believed the most had a better chance of recovering from ailments which it was possible to recover from. They passed on their genes more often than patients who didn't believe.
I found a very interesting article in the Harvard Magazine - The Placebo Effec t - An ingenious researcher finds the real ingredients of “fake” medicine.
Quote: “What we ‘placebo neuroscientists’…have learned [is] that therapeutic rituals move a lot of molecules in the patients’ brain, and these molecules are the very same as those activated by the drugs we give in routine clinical practice,” Benedetti wrote in an e-mail. “In other words, rituals and drugs use the very same biochemical pathways to influence the patient’s brain.” It’s those advances in “hard science,” he added, that have given placebo research a legitimacy it never enjoyed before.
A study published online this past year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences demonstrated that the placebo response can occur even at the unconscious level. The team showed that images flashed on a screen for a fraction of a second—too quickly for conscious recognition—could trigger the response,but only if patients had learned earlier to associate those specific images with healing. Thus, when patients enter a room containing medical equipment they associate with the possibility of feeling better, “the mind may automatically make associations that lead to actual positive health outcomes,” says psychiatry research fellow Karin Jensen, the study’s lead author.
Back in the dim and distant past when there wasn't much in the way of medical treatment, the shamans' rituals could have acted like a placebo. "... the survival value of the kind of brain which manifests itself as religious belief under the right circumstances" could be something to do with Paleolithic patients who believed the most had a better chance of recovering from ailments which it was possible to recover from. They passed on their genes more often than patients who didn't believe.
Where are the snake and mushroom smilies?
