How can we practice this effect and what can it cure?
In: 5
I’m going to throw some water on the fire about the placebo effect. A lot of the early work on placebo was not careful about what was being studied (placebo *effect* or placebo *control)*, and there isn’t very good evidence it works for actual injury or illness, but it does work for subjective experience.
When you look through reviews and meta-analyses, most studies list the outcomes as the subjective stuff: pain, emotionality (e.g., depressive feelings, anxiety), subjective self-report of side-effects and some symptoms. Some side-effects are literally caused by placebo, termed nocebo since they’re bad, so it’s not surprising placebo can stop them.
There aren’t many studies demonstrating they help with physical ailments, like healing a physical injury. Also many people confuse placebo *effect* with placebo *control*, and they are not the same. if you look up placebo effect, you will find studies that refer to it as placebo effect, but it’s mixing together potential placebo effect with lots of other processes (e.g., natural healing, spontaneous remission of disease).
Concrete example, you get a cold and get placebo. You heal. We can’t say the placebo *caused* the healing. You could have just healed naturally. Or if its cancer, cancers do spontaneously go into remission.
In conclusion, the placebo effect is real and important, but it’s not proven to be as profound as some early studies made it look.
See [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Confounding_factors](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Confounding_factors)
Oh yeah, and the answer for how it works for what we know is by modifying expectations. At least that’s the hypothesis, and there is some evidence for it. Some argue it’s by classical conditioning: we have associations in our memory of responding to certain stimuli (e.g., a pill) in certain ways (e.g., feeling better), and so we automatically do.
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