And here I have been handing them out for free all along! If I only had known... :-)

At one point I did a lot of reading about mind and matter. Things like ESP. The conclusion that I came to is that the research that supports paranormal powers is uncommonly poorly done. However I also believe that attitudes and physical state are not unconnected. The placebo effect is real. Furthermore people are often equipped with better powers of observation than they can access rationally, and so there is value in having ways to access this "intuition".

Now about the placebo effect. A single-blind study is where the people the patient interacts with know what is happening, but don't talk to the patient. A double-blind study is one where the people the patient interacts with are themselves blind. No serious medical research today is done with a single-blind study. Why? Because of a classic set of experiements showing that the beliefs of doctors in a single-blind study affected whether people lived or died.

So if you believe in prayer, and you are surrounded by people who believe in prayer, whether or not prayer has a real direct effect, believing that it does, and knowing that it is being tried on your behalf has a real chance of helping. In fact if you merely have someone you trust who believes in prayer, and they know prayer is being done on your behalf, based on research in the placebo effect that is a single blind study and their belief (even though unshared by you) that something is being done may well help.

It may be just a placebo effect, but I hate throwing away something effective because of a prejudice about the label...

And on a related note, I believe that, say, Tarot is bunk. But I firmly believe that a person with a good intuition who believes in Tarot, and whose rational mind gets out of the way when (s)he does Tarot, is likelly to give valuable Tarot readings.

Again, just because I believe the purported tool is broken is no need to throw away potentially useful results.

Cheers,
Ben