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To: Charles Meyer, PWP with MD From: George Andes, PWP without MD Your posting about FTS was right on the money. The value of strict double blind experiments is hard for many of us laymen to come to grips with. The placebo effect is not obvious to the subject who has been given the sugar pill instead of the real stuff; neither is the examiner who knows who is taking the sugar pill and who is taking the real stuff aware of the extent of the unconscious bias present in his observations. Only "self-imposed blindness" can create the objectivity necessary to get useful results. When I say this, I am really talking to myself. I am a candidate for FTS waiting eagerly and in terror for the call summoning me to have a hole drilled in my skull and a needle inserted in my brain by a person I have never met, and at that with the full understanding that there is a one in three chance that my barely suppressed instinct to run away as fast as I can may be wasted effort, an effort expended for a mock ceremony, a placebo operation.