I would recommend watching this documentary from Alejandro Jodorowsky's son, Christobol. Its important to watch it all the way through. In it he discusses Psychomagic and Psychoshamanism (two fields his father developed) and the relationship between ritual and healing, and how belief plays into the psychological or subconscious mechanism that promotes recovery. That's all I meant by my obviously rhetorical comments above, that there is an enormous amount of power within the belief centers of being.
