![]() Placebo (and acupuncture) doesn't actually help you. Only the nothing group didn't feel better, only the medicine group could actually breathe better. They had the patients with the asthma attack undergo one of the four interventions, then measured two things: 1) Do you feel better? 2) Can you actually breathe better? Only one group didn't feel better only one group breathed better. Perhaps the golden apple of medical research on placebo happened by accident, when a study on asthma medication had four groups: medicine, placebo, acupuncture (because one of the researchers had a side gig that didn't work out for him), and nothing. As a result, research in recent years has demonstrated that pain medicine is less effective than we thought, because they've managed to eliminate more of the nonexistent placebo effect. ![]() Even in places like pain and nausea, medical researchers are getting really good at identifying the many, many ways we can Dumbo ourselves into a Jim Crow routine. ![]() Anywhere there's something that can be quantified, it's just a reporting error because patients and doctors both want to help each other. It only "works" on things that can't currently be measured, like pain and nausea. Unfortunately for fans of Your Mind Makes It Real, the placebo effect has been thoroughly debunked as an actual effect. Although taking a placebo when you should be taking actual treatment might. This could even kill them, as Your Mind Makes It Real! Only. The opposite is the nocebo effect, in which someone believes something is hurting them or making them sick, when it's really not. note This can have uses - particularly where it turns out the placebo and treatment arms of a trial have near-identical outcomes, which means the treatment didn't do anything to help and should not be used - but often, drug companies prefer to do comparison to placebo because they don't want to do the really useful test and compare against the currently-considered-best treatment, in case they come up short. The most common use is in drug trials, in which a control group is given a placebo, to compare the effects in case the drug actually is only effective due to the placebo effect, or is even worse. The placebo effect is where a patient thinks that a 'medicine' is healing them, even though it doesn't have an actual medical effect.
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