If the placebo effect works by tricking the brain, why does it need to be tricked if it’s apparently able to solve the issue on its own?
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One theory I’ll mention is that some symptoms caused/fixed by the placebo effect are often stress related or being made MUCH worse by stress.
The act of taking a placebo you’ve been told will fix you, someone validating your symptoms, and the sunk cost can all contribute to symptoms feeling better even if nothing was actually happening.
People might be depressed and stressing about qualifying for the drug trial leading up to it.
And as someone else pointed out, doctors aren’t great at identification of causes, so the body can often heal from really horrible things just by following the basics, which might have aligned with a drug trial rather than being aided by it. If those people are given the placebo you get data on a baseline
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