Derek Thompson

They don't cure cancer.

They don't fix a broken arm.

That's not how placebos work.

Placebos do affect the perception of that signal.

So placebos are highly effective for insomnia.

Placebos are highly effective for ADHD, for anxiety disorder, for all kinds of conditions where the

what you're dealing with is an illness, not a sickness.

It's not a physical break of some kind.

It's not some kind of physical damage.

It's the perception.

It's the signal of that damage.

So that's what placebos can and can't do.

And anybody who tells you that placebos can magically become your biology, that's not necessarily the case.

uh at all and then in terms of who is who is uh susceptible to placebo we're all susceptible to varying degrees there are some differences between you know some people seem to be more uh more um uh active active uh they can they feel more of a change than others from placebos but we're not exactly sure why that's still an open uh debate in the scientific literature on on who responds and who doesn't the good news is that many of these placebos

they don't actually require any kind of physical intervention.

There's all kinds of beliefs that we can adopt that don't even require us to necessarily take a pill or take a shot.

Not that we shouldn't.

I mean, I become much, you know, my family, my wife has Chinese background, and her family has been into herbal Chinese medicine as long as I've known them.

And I would always kind of make fun of it and say, well, you know, there wasn't a double blind control study.

You know, the evidence doesn't show very much.