Health management system
The incorporation of the cost–benefit calculations into body regulation provides a science grounded approach to mind–body phenomena such as placebos, are otherwise not explainable by low level, noneconomic, and purely feedback based homeostatic or allostatic theories.
Placebos are explained as the result of false information about the availability of external treatment and support that mislead the health management system [3] into not deploying evolved self-treatments.
[14] Evolution, according to Nicholas Humphrey, has selected an internal health management system that uses cost benefit analysis upon whether the deployment of a self-treatment aids biological fitness, and so should be activated.
a specially designed procedure for "economic resource management" that is, I believe, one of the key features of the "natural health-care service" which has evolved in ourselves and other animals to help us deal throughout our lives with repeated bouts of sickness, injury, and other threats to our well-being.
The health management system factors in the presence of such external treatment and social support as one aspect of the circumstances needed to determine whether it is advantageous to deploy or not an evolved self-treatment.
Nicholas Humphrey describes how the health management system explains placebos – an external treatment without direct physiological effects – as follows: Suppose, for example, a doctor gives someone who is suffering an infection a pill that she rightly believes to contain an antibiotic: because her hopes will be raised she will no doubt make appropriate adjustments to her health-management strategy – lowering her precautionary defences in anticipation of the sickness not lasting long.
[1]The health management system, in other words, when faced with an infection is tricked into making a mistaken cost benefit analysis using false information.
The idea of a fatigue governor was first proposed in 1924 by the 1922 Nobel Prize winner Archibald Hill,[22] and more recently, on the basis of modern research, by Tim Noakes.
[23][24][25][26][27] Like with the health management system, the central governor shares the idea that much of what is attributed to low level feedback homeostatic regulation is, in fact, due to top down control by the brain.
[28] However, such low level theories do not explain why running muscle fatigue is affected by information relevant to cost benefit trade offs.
