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this post was submitted on 22 Dec 2023
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There's something up with the placebo effect.
Sometimes, people just get better. Your mood affects your heart rate, your blood sugar, your mobility even. Thinking you are getting better helps you get better. This isn't controversial, the placebo effect has long been understood and accounted for in experimental design.
What I don't understand then is why we don't try to take advantage of this effect more often. If I have a small chance of making people feel better with a sugar pill, why not give out sugar pills and claim they have miracle effects all the time?
We do, I remember my friends mom had pills labeled placebo, and she said they where making her feel better, me and my friend looked at eachother and said nothing in front of her mom. When we where alone together we laughed a little and agreed that we shouldn't say anything since her mom was doing better.
One of the remarkable things is that a placebo still works even if you know it's a placebo.
Because you expect it to work to some degree because you know about the placebo effect.
We do. But if you were aware of it, it wouldn't work.
But placebos do still work when you know they're placebos.
Sometimes but not in all people. It's worth keeping it low key just for that.
They also work better if they're an injection as opposed to a pill
Then do injections, which are more effective placebos than pills are.
Because we've decided it's nonethical for healthcare professionals. Any doctor knowingly prescribing placebo and lying about it could get in some major trouble. Like a couple decades ago I heard a psychiatrist mourn the loss of disulfiram (antabuse) implants from their treatment arsenal; it worked very well as a placebo but research didn't show a clear improvement over placebo, so they could no longer use it.
I am kind of glad that non-license-needing wellness consultants can still use the placebo effect for good, even if it is sometimes predatory and sometimes outright dangerous.