On road repair and the placebo effect

Epistemic status: I’m not a doctor and don’t even have a drivers license.

Here is a model of how healing works:

First there is a sharp drop in health as someone gets injured, followed by a period in which their health gets back to normal.

The placebo effect goes like this: people can heal faster by taking sugar pills and having a doctor throw impressive sounding words at them.

Here is a model of how healing works while the placebo effect takes place:

It is the same, except the healing goes much faster. And it’s even for free!

The mystery of the placebo effect is: why can’t people heal faster all the time, why are the sugar pills and the impressive sounding words necessary?

Let me explain by analogy with road repair.

Here is a model of how road repair works:

The capacity of the road slowly decreases as it gets worn down by usage. Then follows a period where the capacity gets back to normal through repair.

This model is wrong. When a road gets repaired one lane is kept open and the other is closed to allow the maintenance crew to work in peace. Its capacity is halved during the repair:

A person is basically a road. Either a road for food from the fridge to the toilet or a road for ideas from the ear to the mouth. Thus a better model for the human healing process, has health, being roughly equivalent to capacity, actually dropping in the beginning:

There is another way to repair a road. Both lanes get closed at the same time. This has the advantage of allowing the repairing to happen faster but drops the capacity of the road temporarily to zero:

When would you do that? When you can easily offload the traffic from this road to other roads during the duration of the repair.

Sugar pills and all the other things that trigger the placebo effect are signaling the body that it is taken care of, that some of the tasks of self-preservation are offloaded to others.

The placebo effect happens when the body “closes both lanes” and fully concentrates on just healing:

Please note that this explanation of the placebo effect is falsifiable.