Placebos Can Fool Your Mind, but Not Your Body
Here is a neat experiment demonstrating how the minds of people with asthma can be tricked by placebos, but not their bodies.
It is not meant to be a story about people with asthma, but about all of us — how we are susceptible to certain kinds of illusions when we use our subjective feelings to determine if a treatment is effective for something that ails us.
Placebos are greatly misunderstood by professionals, not just laypersons. Placebos are not magic. They do not produce measurable body change. If a substance produces measurable body changes, it is not a placebo.
What is a placebo? Something that being performed or provided with positive expectations and social support for someone believing that it is effective, plus the passage of time.
A lot of adults take a single aspirin for a headache. The headache goes away.
But one aspirin is too low a dosage for reducing pain. The headache was going to go away without the aspirin. A randomized clinical trial (RCT) could easily show that.
The problem is that people do not typically conduct their own RCTs. They judge what works by before/after comparisons of their subjective experiences.
