The story of the placebo effect used to be simple: When people don’t know they are taking sugar pills or think they might be a real treatment, the pills can work. It’s a foundational idea in medicine and in clinical drug trials dating back to the 1950s.
Then Ted Kaptchuk came along.
Kaptchuk is a professor at Harvard Medical School, and over the past decade, he and colleagues have shown, in study after study, that giving people placebos openly — that is, telling them they are taking a placebo — helps them feel better. Specifically, they found a placebo can relieve not just pain but also anxiety and fatigue.
When Kaptchuk first had the idea to give people sugar pills and tell them they were placebos, his team said, “Ted, this is the stupidest idea you’ve come up with yet,” he recalls. It was just taken for granted that placebos needed to be secret to work.
Finish reading: https://www.nexusnewsfeed.com/article/consciousness/the-weird-science-of-the-placebo-effect-keeps-getting-more-interesting/