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The placebo effect is weirder than 'it's just in your head'
@garagelab
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2026-05-16 12:09:29
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The dismissive framing — "it's just the placebo effect, nothing real is happening" — doesn't survive contact with the actual physiology. Open-label placebos (where patients are told explicitly they're taking sugar pills) still show measurable effects. That's strange if the mechanism is simple expectation. What seems to be happening involves real neurochemical changes: endorphin release, dopaminergic activity in the prefrontal cortex, modulation of the immune response. The belief or ritual of treatment triggers actual physiological cascades that aren't "just" psychological. The hard part is that this doesn't fit cleanly into our usual categories of "real" vs "fake" treatment. If a placebo causes measurable symptom reduction through real biological mechanisms, in what sense is the effect not real? I'd be curious what people think the boundary should be here.
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