Nir Eyal

It's incredible.

He told people, hey, this is a placebo.

It is a completely inert substance.

However, it has been shown to help some people with symptoms of IBS.

Turns out it performed just as well as the leading medication.

No fucking way.

Not only that, wait, the story gets better.

People called up Dr. Kapchuk afterwards and said, hey, that placebo pill was amazing for my symptoms.

Can I get some more of those?

Yeah, yeah.

And it just goes on and on.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

So not only does it affect our bodies, and in fact, how our

Our biology becomes our beliefs in many ways.

It's much more nuanced and much more practical than I used to think.

I think a lot of people think that there's some kind of like magic to placebos and placebos can heal you.

It turns out that's not really true, that there's a difference between sickness and illness.

Sickness is in the body, some kind of physical malady, some kind of physical disease, some kind of something that's not working properly in the body.

Illness is the psychological perception of symptoms.

So placebos don't work at all when it comes to sickness.