How can we practice this effect and what can it cure?
In: 5
You take something that has no proven ability to help you however your belief that it will help you causes it to help you.
For example: you have a headache. You take a sugar pill believing it is a normal pain killer and your headache still goes away. That sugar pill is referred to as the placebo. A placebo doesn’t work for everyone or all the time.
Interestingly, the bigger the placebo the more likely it is to work. For example if you take an annoyingly big sugar pill thinking it is a pain killer it’s more likely to remove your headache than a small easy to swallow sugar pill.
Edit: to add to this, it’s important in new drug testing because sometimes the act of being told you need to take something can cause the symptoms to go away. As such in clinical trials you need to compare the real drug to a placebo. If a placebo works 50% of the time and the new drug also works 50% of the time it’s not actually working. If a placebo works 50% of the time and the new drug works 100% of the time then the drug does have an effect beyond just the placebo of taking something drug-like. There is more to it but it’s beyond the ELI5 scope provably and more into scientific testing rather than actually speaking about placebos.
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