[Avodah] Whoever is maqpid...

[Micha Berger]

On Tue Aug 16 12:59pm EDT, RnTK wrote:
:                    It's like sheidim, if you don't believe in them and
: don't worry about them they have little or no power over you.

To which RMYG added on Tue Aug 16 9:07pm:
: R'n TK is paraphrasing the Gemara in Pesachim (110b towards the top) and
: Rashi there.

There the statement is made about zugos, but since the gemara just stated
that the problem with zugos is that they are prone to interference by
sheidim, it's "6 of one, a half-dozen of the other".

In any case, it seems there is experimental evidence. See
http://www.theatlantic.com/life/archive/2011/09/the-dark-side-of-the-placebo-effect-when-intense-belief-kills/245065/
(or <http://bit.ly/orrUsW>):

    The Atlantic Home
    Wednesday, September 21, 2011

    The Dark Side of the Placebo Effect: When Intense Belief Kills
    By Alexis Madrigal
    Sep 14 2011, 11:52 AM ET

    They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from
    home. Their median age was 33. All but one -- 116 of the 117 -- were
    healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the
    time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of
    the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious
    problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five
    natural causes of death for other American men in their age group.

    Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could
    figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of
    them had been sick, physically. The men weren't clustered all that
    tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation
    from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would
    have been stumped.
    ...

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             I always give much away,
micha at aishdas.org        and so gather happiness instead of pleasure.
http://www.aishdas.org           -  Rachel Levin Varnhagen
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