Quack remedies and Placebos

Many times before physicians had confronted the phenomenon of misplaced public trust validated by apparently successful cures. One of the more notable episodes involved a patented device called "Perkins Metallic Tractors." These little pins were advertised as curative for "topical diseases" from gout to rheumatism. Many discerning people, including George Washington, testified that the tractors worked. …

… well into the twentieth century, people continued to purchase extraordinary quantities of worthless nostrums--"Boyd's Batteries" and even "powdered unicorn's horn"--not merely because they were gullibly manipulated by quacks and cheats but because people believed that at least a few of these products, in some sense, really "worked." …

Perkins's Metallic tractors may have been exposed as fraudulent, but the public has repeatedly resisted the cautions of the medical establishment and continued over the years to "discover" the therapeutic power of similar kinds of objects. In this century, "Boyd's Batteries" and similar objects were worn around the neck to improve flagging energy and soothe various aches and pains … http://www.nlm.nih.gov/hmd/emotions/self.html

Still goes on. I’ve seen sacred geometry jewelry demonstrated to work because of dowsing rods.
Not exactly stringent scientific testing.

Getting one’s self into harmony with this universe
We hear a great deal about getting one’s self into harmony with certain forces that are supposed to be moving through this universe.

We are told that there is a secret “flame” in our atmospheric ether which we can extract after a little practice and it will have an astonishing effect upon us.

We are told of elixirs that float and crackle all about us, which only a few on this round ball have ever caught any of, but they have been filled with extraordinary powers.

Those powers really all start from the soul principle in each of us, and it is what we ourselves have generated that we finally inhale as “flame,” “elixir vitae,” or “forces.”
Emma Curtis Hopkins
December 23, 1894

Beliefs are strange things. Is a belief a belief or is it knowledge?