The Placebo Effect
My attempt to understand this strangest of phenomena. Something I think can revolutionize modern medicine.
November 16th, 2021
https://www.samstack.io/p/all-placebos-are-not-created-equal
- Different types of placebo have different effects1 (injections > creams > pills). This is fairly intuitive
- Doctor characteristics (warmth, competence, professionalism, clinic environment) contribute to placebo effect.
- Children are more receptive than adults2. So much so that sometimes drugs seem lesser effective on children
The reason for this was not actually that the drugs were any less effective in children, but that because children were more receptive to the placebo, the active drug looked less effective in comparison.
- This speaks to something I never thought about when it comes to placebos. Because we measure the effectiveness of a drug against a placebo, a population sample having a better placebo will reflect as the drug not being as effective as it actually is.
The implications of this are pretty serious - the placebo effect in the United States3 has actually become quite a lot stronger over time, meaning that drugs that once would have been approved may not be now - because their performance relative to that of placebo is less convincing.
- How should medicine evolve so as to maximize the benefits of the placebo effect?
January 23rd, 2022
https://www.secretorum.life/p/the-tale-of-the-shaman-science-magic
magical healing techniques are psychosocial technologies for eliciting superordinary placebo responses.
- A “charlatan” shaman who does not inherently believe in their own healing powers will not be able to elicit a healing response
- A patient requiring healing needs to feel that the healer believes in a cure
- “… a constructive doctor-patient relationship can tangibly improve patients’ responsiveness to treatment”4
- Complete activation of the immune system puts a large resource demand on the human body5, and because it might not be ideal to leave yourself completely weakened after fighting the illness, the immune system is never completely activated.
- But when the body knows that it will be healed in the future, it will stop optimizing for the future and activate a complete immune response.
- Placebos basically indicate to the body that things will be better in the future. The placebo relaxes the mind, and releases the latent healing power in our body
In this view, magical practices of this nature are inherently not amenable to scientific study—the second you put someone in a lab and have them fill out a consent form, the potential for magic has already been lost.
This form of Science Magic™ can only work on children who still possess the unreflective naive belief characteristic of an enchanted worldview.