> Why are some things only effective if we believe them to be so?
Are they though? I used to think so until I skimmed Wikipedia article on placebo some 5 minutes ago. According to the article (as of now), there's been plenty of research on placebo done in the past couple decades, which revealed... the most mundane reality you'd expect: placebo effect impacts perception of symptoms, and can only do as much as a transient change in perception can. Apparently, the old studies that ascribed all kinds of big effects to placebos, were failing to account for regression to the mean.
Now, I haven't checked the sources, but I'm inclined to believe it - it feels right. The possibility of placebos being meaningfully effective on the targeted condition itself felt like bad writing[0] - the same phenomenon should be giving us all kinds of superpowers, which we don't see. I mean, when you get drunk, you may tolerate pain better, but your skin doesn't turn into kevlar with steel inserts just because the drunk you believes you're impervious to knives and bullets.
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[0] - Like in fiction, when you discover the author didn't think through the consequences of a minor plot point they're making - a plot point that, extrapolated ever so slightly, would instantly break the main story, and/or disrupt the entire fictional universe.
Certainly some effects are clearly only explainable by physical changes. Cognitive effects, though, it feels are a bit easier to see will be in the realm of placebo.
Telling people something won't work could cause it to not work. Which is terrifying.
Edit: I am slow to realize it may have sounded like "shut up" was directed at you. My apologies. I meant that more for the generic voice of caution that is as often very valuable. And i am very nervous on what it implies for general health reporting. How many more people are sick because they think they should be? What can you even do with that idea?
Right, and if someone is healthier because they ate their spinach, that seems to imply we should encourage mistakes in that direction?
That is, if we were to reduce the negative effects reporting, but increase the positive ones, would that bias the world in that direction? (That make sense?)
There are some weird quantum effects which allows your mind to "steer" the future into the direction you want. You can choose from a set/distribution of possible futures.
Look no further than the multi billion dollar health supplements market for placebos that don’t do anything
But seriously the only ways off the top of my head to mobilize placebos is to lie to people which doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. They just lead to more misconceptions.
> But seriously the only ways off the top of my head to mobilize placebos is to lie to people which doesn’t seem worth the squeeze. They just lead to more misconceptions.
But that's literally what marketing does, not just for supplements, but in general. The limits of what can be achieved through lies and persuasion are well-mapped now. There is a tension between what marketers would like to do, and what the law allows them to, but it's a tension over marginal effectiveness - the illegal methods are only slightly more effective than the legal ones. There are no psy-corps placebo mind control superpowers, known or hypothesized - if there were, then regulations around advertising and fair competition would look more like regulations around access to enriched fissile material or highly infectious pathogens.
Skimming Wikipedia, it seems that effort was spent, and what it revealed is that "placebo effect" is mostly bunk - any discernible effects exist only patient's perception of symptoms and things influenced by it (e.g. patient calming down); any change in objective measurements seem to be better explained by plain regression to the mean (e.g. patient just getting better on their own).
As for exploiting the perceptual aspects for good and bad, well, that's a really really well-explored ground - we've been at it for thousands of years. Religion, folk medicine, homeopathy, or the modern bullshit fads like fitness, healthy food, spiritual exercise philosophies, etc. - they all build up huge emotional frameworks around core interventions that, by themselves, have slight to no effect. They are big money printers, tho.
It's this huge amalgamation of marketing and junk pseudo-science, a quasi-religion that gets people involved emotionally to the point of defining their own identity in terms of their diets and exercise activities. It surrounds a small kernel of good ideas about health and nutrition, but it leads people to it in a round-about fashion, extracting money on the way.
