Yeah, but people are continually scammed out of their life savings for snake oil that promises to do the impossible. If your making 100k and spend $30 a month on some bottle of homeopathic nonsense and placebo yourself out of a headache, that's fine I guess.

But the person who sold that to you is also getting hundreds of dollars a month from people making barely more than that by selling tic tacs or whatever at a several thousand percent markup, promising false hope to the vulnerable at the mere cost of everything they own.

Bit of a sore spot for me I guess, just because of who I know. What you say is technically true - a bit of extra placebo might be fine, but so many fall really hard for them, and the "innocent" use helps by middle+ class people who can afford it helps legitimize it, making it easier to prey on those who can't.

On the crystal bit: honestly, alternative medicine stuff, as bogus as it may or may not be, can be fine and even sometimes helpful if it doesn't replace any of the actual medicine. Not only are placebos pretty dandy, some alternative medicine things actually help with treatment adhesion sometimes, because it can make the patient feel empowered in their health outcomes more than the usual spiel of "keep hydrated"/"eat well"/"sleep well"/"exercise" and in turn, can help people actually do these things, because they feel that they can actually impact their health with things they do.

Now, does this good outweigh the risk of them dropping the actual treatment over the alternative medicine stuff? I don't know, I'm not a researcher in this area, but I feel like not everything we do had to make sense you know? If something feels good and there's no harm in doing it, go ahead and knock yourself out, we are after all, sentient meat, and that comes with quirks.

Spot on. the placebo effect is powerful and very likely plays a role in both scenarios.

Often I have supposed really expensive cables improve things just because it was time to replace cables already, or the connection was janky to begin with because the budding audiophile is upgrading from, say, bare wire connectors to banana plugs.

More than placebo, I think it’s a god source for spiritualism.

I’m one of those “edgelords” that believe that organised religion doesn’t have a place in a civilised modern society, but I don’t think spiritualism in and of itself is bad.

Thus I’m all for crystals, horoscopes, praying and whatnot to fulfill one’s spiritual needs.