Just One Question | Shamini Jain: How Can You Heal Fro...
There’s an elephant in the room anytime someone talks about energy healing, an elephant named Placebo.
For most of us, placebo means you got the sugar pill. It means whatever’s happening is all in your mind, not in your body. That’s even what Tami thought when she sat down to talk with award-winning researcher in psychoneuroimmunology and trained clinical psychologist Shamini Jain, PhD, in 2023.
But here’s the thing—placebo isn’t the thing science needs to control for and throw out. It’s the measurable evidence of what our bodies do on their own, and Shamini makes the case with research most of us have never heard about.
In this episode:
- The open-label placebo studies where patients are told outright they’re receiving a placebo—and improve anyway
- The four elements Shamini says show up in every healing encounter: expectation, conditioning, relationship, and meaning and ritual
- Why placebo-controlled surgery trials should make all of us ask harder questions
- What the antidepressant data actually says—and why “we work” may be the better takeaway than “the drugs don’t”
Mallory and Chris have spent the past year and a half working on a podcast about energy healing (Phenomena) and Sounds True is offering—right now—an immersion course on energy healing featuring Shamini Jain as well as Robert Peng and Laurie Nealon…so now felt like the perfect time to bring this conversation back. And maybe rename that elephant for good.
Taken from the full Insights at the Edge conversation with Shamini Jain.
