The biggest headache for any drug-company executive is the placebo. A placebo, or sugar pill, is used in controlled drug trials precisely to show that the drug in question works.

One of two groups of patients is given the active drug, while the other group is given the placebo, but neither knows who got what. The assumption is that far more patients will show improvements on the drug than on the placebo. Upon this assumption is built the entire edifice of modern medicine.

Nevertheless, in practice, so many patients receive the same relief and even the same side effects with a placebo as with the drug itself that a placebo often is not a true control.

I’ve just returned from a Transformational Leadership Council conference in New Orleans.  Although I had a wonderful time and celebrated my birthday surrounded by friends and the Big Easy’s Dixieland music, I have to say that I was shocked by what I saw and read while I was there.

During our visit, we drove around some of the areas that had been hit by Hurricane Katrina.  Naturally, I was disturbed by the devastation still apparent in some quarters, which the richest country in the world had not rebuilt more than five years after the disaster. Nevertheless, that was not the main source of my alarm. What shocked me most was the nature of my country’s statistics these days.

All of us were left traumatized by the rampage shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Gifford last Saturday, which left 13 others in the line of fire injured and six dead, including a 9 year old born on September 11, 2001.  Although President Barack Obama was credited with a moving bi-partisan speech at the Arizona memorial last week, the political repercussions of the event continue, with Democrats blaming Republicans for inflammatory language and Republicans blaming Democrats for exploiting the situation to leverage their own sagging political fortunes.    Nevertheless, to lay the cause of the tragedy at the door of any single partisan cause — whether Sarah Palin, lax gun laws or too liberal democratic legislation — is entirely to miss the point.   This latest crisis is symptomatic of a deeper problem in America, with more potential repercussions than those of any single cataclysmic event.   The problem has to do with the very nature of how we have defined ourselves and our persistent need to categorize the elements of our world as some version of  ‘us’ vs ‘them.’   Increasing divides It has particularly broken my heart because although I have lived in Britain for 25 years, I am – and always will be – an American.  Over all this time and from this transatlantic perspective, I have observed my country increasingly polarize — black against white, Christian against Muslim and now Democrat against Republican. And this largely stems from the same source — a tendency to insist on sameness — ‘people like me’ — in our lives.

For those of you who have just come on board, Korotkov, a professor at St. Petersburg Technical University, invented the Elecrophotonic Imaging (EPI)/Gas Discharge Visualization (GDV) technique, which makes use of state-of-the-art optics, digitized television matrices and a powerful computer. Korotkov’s equipment blends several techniques: photography, measurements of light intensity and computerized pattern recognition.

This equipment aims to measure the subtle light emissions that emanate from all living things. Korotkov’s equipment stirs up individual photons by ‘evoking’, or stimulating them into an excited state so that they shine millions of times more intensely than normal.

These light emissions offer valuable information about the state of health of the organism in question; the subtlest of changes show up as a change in light.

The GDV is now widely used in Russia as a diagnostic tool for many illnesses and also for materials testing – particularly of liquids —because it can detect the subtlest of changes in freshness or stability.

Lynne is now working on a series of programs that bring together her 20 years’ research to help you overcome chronic problems in your life, from diseases such as diabetes and arthritis, and to train you in transformative skills such as energy healing, intention and learning.

If you’d like to learn more about these, sign up to join Lynne’s e-community.  The form is on the right-hand column of this page, and we’ll send you an alert every time we add a new program to the series.

My two teenager daughters are suckers for Desperate Housewives, the television soap opera detailing all the jealousy, intrigue, backstabbing and criminal activity that lays behind the doors and manicured lawns of that upscale suburban neighborhood, Wisteria Lane.

Although almost all the inhabitants are beautiful and affluent, no one stays happy for long. All of these ‘best friends’ are miserable in their constant comparison with each other. So I was fascinated to read a recent intriguing study of suicide, carried out by Mary Daly and Daniel Wilson of the US Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, with Norman Johnson of the US Census Bureau.  They examined suicide deaths to see if it had anything to do with income.