William Sax

"Efficacy" is here construed by several contributors in a secondary sense that if you enjoyed the ritual, and that pleasure benefited you in some way, then it was effective. But most people want to know if the ritual actually did the thing it says it's doing, and few pieces grapple with this more challenging question.

For my money, the best piece was that by Howard Brody, an M.D. who synthesizes the literature of the placebo response so that it offers one way to both allow that the ritual is indeed healing the patient, for example, without also agreeing that the agent is occult.… (more)