placebo effect

Trick or Treatment: The Undeniable Facts About Alternative Medicine
by Edzard Ernst and Simon Singh
Published 17 Aug 2008

Unfortunately for acupuncturists, this third theory attributed the impacts of acupuncture to the placebo effect, a medical phenomenon with a long and controversial history. In one sense, any form of treatment that relies heavily on the placebo effect is fraudulent. Indeed, many bogus therapies from the nineteenth century had turned out to be nothing more than placebo-based treatments. In the next section we will explore the placebo effect in detail and see how it might relate to acupuncture. If the placebo effect can successfully explain the apparent benefits of acupuncture, then 2,000 years of Chinese medical expertise would evaporate.

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For example, although a patient will derive benefit from taking aspirin largely due to the pill’s biochemical effects, there can also be an added bonus benefit due to the placebo effect, which is a result of the patient’s confidence in the aspirin itself or confidence in the physician who prescribes it. In other words, a genuine medicine offers a benefit that is largely due to the medicine itself and partly due to the placebo effect, whereas a fake medicine offers a benefit that is entirely due to the placebo effect. As the placebo effect arises out of the patient’s confidence in the treatment, Haygarth wondered about the factors that would increase that confidence and thereby maximize the power of the placebo.

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He concluded that, among other things, the doctor’s reputation, the cost of the treatment and its novelty could all boost the placebo effect. Many physicians throughout history have been quick to hype their reputations, link high cost with medical potency and emphasize the novelty of their cures, so perhaps they were already aware of the placebo effect. In fact, prior to Haygarth’s experiments, it seems certain that doctors had been secretly exploiting it for centuries. Nevertheless, Haygarth deserves credit for being the first to write about the placebo effect and bringing it out into the open. Interest in the placebo effect grew over the course of the nineteenth century, but it was only in the 1940s that an American anaesthetist named Henry Beecher established a rigorous programme of research into its potential.

Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain's Ability to Deceive, Transform, and Heal
by Erik Vance
Published 14 Sep 2016

Something surprising happened when he analyzed the data: What people said about their pain tracked perfectly with the activation of several parts of the brain associated with pain, such as the anterior cingulate cortex (which plays a role in emotions, reward systems, and empathy), the thalamus (which handles sensory perception and alertness), and the insula (which is related to consciousness and perception). Those reporting less pain from the placebo effect showed less activity in key pain-related brain regions. And those who felt less of the placebo showed more. People were not imagining less pain; they were feeling it. Wager’s study not only conclusively showed that the placebo effect is a real phenomenon in the brain; it also showed that people experiencing a placebo effect aren’t crazy or deluded or gullible. Most important, Wager observed the route that the placebo response takes from anticipation to the release of drugs inside the brain.

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Sitting in Zhang’s lovely office in the heart of the world’s largest state-sponsored institution of alternative medicine, I think of vasopressin, the drug Colloca has used to boost placebo effects, and Leonie Koban’s work with peer pressure. Any time a group of people get together, there’s a good chance that vasopressin and oxytocin are flowing. Could it be that the same brain chemistry involved in how we interact with each other actually boosts the placebo effect? Koban found that peer pressure jacks up the placebo effect. Is it such a leap to think that the number of people using a given therapy is not just an effect of how well that therapy works but the cause of how well it works?

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Thus the expectation—and the placebo effect—is higher than it was back in 1987, when it was cleared by the FDA. On the other hand, there is some evidence that placebo effects are going up across the board, though the reasons for this aren’t clear. But imagine if before Ceregene even started the trial it could have eliminated all the people who were going to have a placebo response—not just those in the placebo group but also those who received the real treatment. (Remember, just because a person is getting an active drug doesn’t mean he can’t experience a placebo effect.) What if there was some evidence that certain people were more likely to respond to a placebo than others, and they could be identified and excluded from experiments?

The Truth About Lies: The Illusion of Honesty and the Evolution of Deceit
by Aja Raden
Published 10 May 2021

In it he wrote, “Placebos have a high degree of therapeutic effectiveness in treating subjective responses.”14 What he meant was that the placebo effect, or the doctor-patient rapport, or the patient’s expectations—whatever you want to call it—plays a most critical role in any type of medical intervention. He believed that “our expectation can have a profound impact on how we heal.”15 What Beecher was calling “expectation” we’ve been calling priming. Stranger still, it seems as if we can be primed to experience the placebo effect through visual cues alone, like the color or shape or size of a pill. As Michael Specter wrote in 2011 about studies of the phenomenon, “The larger the pill, the stronger the placebo effect. Two pills are better than one, and brand name trumps generic.

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The white-coat effect demonstrates that the placebo effect is completely effective even without the placebo—because it’s your mind that’s creating the reality that is, in turn, controlling your body, not the other way around. And once the placebo effect is set in motion, it’s exaggerated by confirmation bias, wherein one already believes an idea and therefore more readily sees or experiences, and more willingly accepts, evidence that the already-embraced idea is, in fact, true. Ultimately, it makes for a perfectly self-perpetuating delusion. Victorian Children Did Way Too Much Blow But neither the placebo effect nor the faith of thousands of devoted customers could save the Rattlesnake King.

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That could have given even a hemophiliac the extra time necessary to form a clot. But for it to work, for him to go from the terror of imminent death to so calm his pulse was barely ticking, would require a powerful sedative. Have you ever heard of the placebo effect? We’ll talk more about it in chapter five, but in short: if you believe strongly enough that something is physically affecting you, often the actual chemistry of your body is altered as though it really were. Can the placebo effect be a powerful enough cure or temporarily reduce the effects of seemingly irreversible conditions? Indeed, it can. Legitimately healing yourself is not as common as simply feeling better, and far harder to explain.

Bad Science
by Ben Goldacre
Published 1 Jan 2008

We know that placebo operations can be effective for knee pain, and even for angina. The placebo effect works on animals and children. It is highly potent, and very sneaky, and you won’t know the half of it until you read the ‘placebo’ chapter in this book. So when our homeopathy fan says that homeopathic treatment makes them feel better, we might reply: ‘I accept that, but perhaps your improvement is because of the placebo effect,’ and they cannot answer ‘No,’ because they have no possible way of knowing whether they got better through the placebo effect or not. They cannot tell. The most they can do is restate, in response to your query, their original statement: ‘All I know is, I feel as if it works.

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They would say: ‘All I know is, I feel as if it works. I get better when I take homeopathy.’ It seems obvious to them, and to an extent it is. This statement’s power, and its flaws, lie in its simplicity. Whatever happens, the statement stands as true. But you could pop up and say: ‘Well, perhaps that was the placebo effect.’ Because the placebo effect is far more complex and interesting than most people suspect, going way beyond a mere sugar pill: it’s about the whole cultural experience of a treatment, your expectations beforehand, the consultation process you go through while receiving the treatment, and much more. We know that two sugar pills are a more effective treatment than one sugar pill, for example, and we know that salt-water injections are a more effective treatment for pain than sugar pills, not because salt-water injections have any biological action on the body, but because an injection feels like a more dramatic intervention.

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These men did not receive that drug, nor did they receive Salvarsan, nor indeed did they receive an apology until 1997, from Bill Clinton. If we don’t want to do unethical scientific experiments with ‘no treatment’ groups on sick people, how else can we determine the size of the placebo effect on modern illnesses? Firstly, and rather ingeniously, we can compare one placebo with another. The first experiment in this field was a meta-analysis by Daniel Moerman, an anthropologist who has specialised in the placebo effect. He took the trial data from placebo-controlled trials of gastric ulcer medication, which was his first cunning move, because gastric ulcers are an excellent thing to study: their presence or absence is determined very objectively, with a gastroscopy camera passed down into the stomach, to avoid any doubt.

Bounce: Mozart, Federer, Picasso, Beckham, and the Science of Success
by Matthew Syed
Published 19 Apr 2010

In 1998, Carol Dweck and a colleague took four hundred fifth-graders: This research is in Andrei Cimpian et al., “Subtle Linguistic Cues Impact Children’s Motivation,” Psychological Science 18 (2007): 314–16. “Enron was the ultimate ‘talent’ company”: Malcolm Gladwell, “The Talent Myth,” New Yorker, July 22, 2002. See also the documentary film The Smartest Guys in the Room. 5. THE PLACEBO EFFECT But Beecher was not the first doctor to have been astonished by the placebo effect: For a brilliantly written introduction to the placebo effect, see Ben Goldacre, Bad Science (London: Fourth Estate, 2008). Henry Beecher’s research on the subject is in “The Powerful Placebo,” Journal of the American Medical Association 159, no. 17 (1955): 1602–06. See also P. Skrabanek and J.

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That was the point of the story of Edwards and Ali. At least one of them (or both) benefited from false beliefs. But those were anecdotes. Is there further evidence about how false beliefs can help to produce positive outcomes? We start with the world of medicine and the placebo effect, one of the most perplexing phenomena in science. By the end of the chapter we’ll see that the placebo effect provides a prism through which to understand how top athletes—and other top performers—are so consistently able to hit peak performance when it really matters. In early 1944, Allied forces launched an offensive foray at Anzio in northern Italy during World War II.

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Goldacre reports that stimulant medication tends to come in red or orange, antidepressants in blue, and so on. Packaging, too, confers cultural meaning that can bolster the placebo effect. Research has found that aspirins contained in snazzy, all-singing-all-dancing packaging are more effective than aspirins contained in dull, boring boxes. Aspirins are not, of course, placebos: the point is that packaging can itself deliver a placebo effect. So, too, can price. Dan Ariely, the behavioral economist, has shown that cheap painkillers are less effective than painkillers identical in every respect except for a more expensive price tag.

The Biology of Belief: Unleashing the Power of Consciousness, Matter & Miracles
by Bruce H. Lipton
Published 1 Jan 2005

The fact that most doctors are not trained to consider the impact of the placebo effect is ironic because some historians make a strong case that the history of medicine is largely the history of the placebo effect. For most of medical history, doctors did not have effective methods to fight disease. Some of the more notorious treatments once prescribed by mainstream medicine include bloodletting, treating wounds with arsenic, and the proverbial cure-all, rattlesnake oil. No doubt some patients, the conservatively estimated one third of the population who are particularly susceptible to the healing power of the placebo effect, got better with those treatments.

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Nocebos: The Power of Negative Beliefs While many in the medical profession are aware of the placebo effect, few have considered its implications for self-healing. If positive thinking can pull you out of depression and heal a damaged knee, consider what negative thinking can do in your life. When the mind, through positive suggestion improves health, it is referred to as the placebo effect. Conversely, when the same mind is engaged in negative suggestions that can damage health the negative effects are referred to as the nocebo effect. In medicine, the nocebo effect can be as powerful as the placebo effect, a fact you should keep in mind every time you step into a doctor’s office.

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When patients get better by ingesting a sugar pill, medicine defines it as the placebo effect. My friend Rob Williams, founder of PSYCH-K, an energy-based psychological treatment system, suggests that it would be more appropriate to refer to it as the perception effect. I call it the belief effect to stress that our perceptions, whether they are accurate or inaccurate, equally impact our behavior and our bodies. I celebrate the belief effect, which is an amazing testament to the healing ability of the body/mind. However, the “all in their minds” placebo effect has been linked by traditional medicine to, at worst, quacks or, at best, weak, suggestible patients.

Predictably Irrational, Revised and Expanded Edition: The Hidden Forces That Shape Our Decisions
by Dan Ariely
Published 19 Feb 2007

Greenspan, Alan, xvii–xix gridlock, legislative, 151, 152 Guidelines for Lawyer Courtroom Conduct (Sweeney), 213 guilt, social norms and, 77 H habits: first decisions translated into, 36–38 questioning, 44 Halloween experiment, 56–58 Hamlet (Shakespeare), xxviii–xxix, 232 Harford, Tim, 291–92 Harvard Business School, 197–98 honesty experiment at, 198–202 health care, 110–11 bundling of medical tests and procedures and, 119–21 conflicts of interest in, 293, 295 defeating procrastination in, 117–21 FREE! procedures and, 62–63 mandatory checkups and, 118 patient compliance and, 260–64 placebo effect and, 173–94, 275–78; see also placebo effect price of medical treatments and, 176, 180–87, 190 public policy and spending on, 190 scientifically controlled trials and, 173–76 self-imposed deadlines and, 118–19 helping, thinking about money and, 74, 75 herding, 36–38 self-herding and, 37–38 Heyman, James, 69–71, 136, 336–37 HIV-AIDS, 90 Holy Roman emperors, placebo effect and, 188 Home Depot, 78 Honda, 120, 121 honesty, 195–230 contemplation of moral benchmarks and, 206–9, 213 dealing with cash and, 217–30 importance of, 214–15 as moral virtue, 203 oaths and, 208–9, 211–13, 215 reward centers in brain and, 203, 208 Smith’s explanation for, 202, 214 superego and, 203–4, 208 see also dishonesty Hong, James, 21 honor codes, 212–13 hormones, expectation and, 179 house sales: anchoring and, 30-31 relativity and, 8–9, 19 value in owner’s eyes and, 129, 135, 265–69 housing market: bubble in, 289–90 decreasing valuations and, 265–66, 279 I ice cream, FREE!

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Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely, “Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay For,” Journal of Marketing Research (2005). Rebecca Waber, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely, “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” JAMA (2008). RELATED READINGS Tor Wager, James Rilling, Edward Smith, Alex Sokolik, Kenneth Casey, Richard Davidson, Stephen Kosslyn, Robert Rose, and Jonathan Cohen, “Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain,” Science (2004). Alia Crum and Ellen Langer, “Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect,” Psychological Science (2007).

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DVD offers and, 55 E earmarking, congressional restrictions on, 204–5 Ebbers, Bernie, 223 economics, standard: arbitrary coherence at odds with, 43, 45, 47–48 behavioral economics vs., xxviii–xxx, 239–40 cost-benefit analysis in, 64–65 human rationality assumed in, xxix, xxx, 239–40 supply and demand in, 45–46 Economist subscription offers, 1–3, 4–6, 9–10 education, 84–86 igniting social passion for, 85–86 “No Child Left Behind” policy and, 85 “elderly,” behavior affected by priming concept of, 170–71 e-mail addiction, 255–59 overcoming, 259 reinforcement schedules and, 257–59 empirical tests: public policy and, 328–29 in science, xxv–xxvi, 325 employees: payment of, see compensation; salaries social vs. market norms in companies’ relations with, 80–84, 252–54 theft and fraud at workplace ascribed to, 195–96 endowment effect, 129–35 energy drinks, impact of price and hype on efficacy of, 184–87 Enron scandal, xiv, 196, 204, 219 envy, comparisons and, 15–19 epidurals, 103–4 Escape from Freedom (Fromm), 148 Europe, savings rate in, 109 evolution, dangers of globalization and, 317–18, 319 exercise, procrastination and, 111 expectations, 155–72, 269–75 art and, 274 beer experiments and, 157–59, 161–62, 163–64, 172 brand associations of Coke and Pepsi and, 166–68 conflicts and, 156–57, 171–72 depth of description in caterers’ offerings and, 164 exotic-sounding ingredients and, 164–65 football plays and, 155–56, 171 garage sales and, 162–63 knowledge before vs. after experience and, 161–64 marketing hype and, 186–87 music and, 270–73, 274 physiology of experience altered by, 161–64, 166–68, 293–94 placebo effect and, 173–94; see also placebo effect restaurant meals and, 269–70 sports car test drives and, 161 stereotypes and, 168–71 taste and, 157–68, 270 upscale coffee ambience and, 159–60 wineglasses and, 165 expense reports, dishonesty in, 223–24 experience, not learning from, xxvii experiments: extrapolation of findings in, xxxi–xxxii isolating individual forces in, xxxi see also empirical tests; specific topics F Fannie Mae, 280, 310 Fastow, Andrew, 219 Federal Depositor Insurance Corporation (FDIC), 280 Federal Reserve, 280, 284–85 Fehr, Ernst, 307–8 financial industry: conflicts of interest and, 295–96 globalization and loss of diversity in, 318–19 inherent fuzziness in, 294–95 profit made from our mistakes by, 298–304 regulation of, 296 see also bankers financial meltdown of 2008, 279–329 bailout plan and, 280, 304–6, 310–11, 312, 314, 319–20 bankers’ behavior in, 291–96 collapse of financial institutions in, 280–81, 314 compensation for bankers and, 306, 310, 311, 319–24 conflicts of interest and, 291–96 empirical testing of approaches to, 328–29 global market and, 316–19 Greenspan’s confession and, xvii-xix housing market collapse and, 265–66, 279 learned helplessness and, 314–16 limitations of rational economics and, 281–82, 324–28 media coverage of, 315–16 mortgage practices and, 279–80, 283–90 planning fallacy and, 297–304 psychological fallout from not understanding what’s going on in, 311–16 public trust and, 304–11 shared suffering in, 303 fines, in social context, 76–77 first decisions: power of, 44 shape of our lives and, 43 translation of, into long-term habits, 36–39 see also anchoring first impressions: imprinting and, 25, 34, 43 see also arbitrary coherence Fiske, Alan, 68 food: expectations and taste of, 164–65, 270 ordering process and enjoyment of, 237–38 see also taste food labels, allure of “zero” on, 61–62 football plays, expectations and perception of, 155–56, 171 Ford Motor Company, 119–21 401(k)s, xiii France, Amazon’s FREE!

Good to Go: What the Athlete in All of Us Can Learn From the Strange Science of Recovery
by Christie Aschwanden
Published 5 Feb 2019

Over the years, he’s worked with elite athletes from numerous sports, including Cadel Evans, Australia’s first winner of the Tour de France, and NBA center Joel Embiid. After decades of observing athletes and their habits, Martin has concluded that most popular recovery modalities work by exploiting the placebo effect. But he doesn’t see that as a reason to dismiss them. On the contrary, he views it as an opportunity. This is real mojo, and instead of calling it the placebo effect he prefers the terms “anticipatory response” or “belief effects.” He uses these alternative names, because people tend to dismiss the word placebo as a synonym for ineffective, when, in fact, these effects are real, and in some cases can be as powerful as many drugs.

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(Reinl), 84–85, 87 ice packs, 81, 85, 87–88 icing (ice baths), 243–44 benefits of, 89–93 placebo effect and, 235–36, 241 by professional athletes, 80–84 whole body cryotherapy vs., 98 “ideal food for recovery” concept, 78–79 illicit drugs, in nutritional supplements, 175–79 illnesses, 121–22, 179–82, 201, 219 illusion of causality, 33 immune system blood tests for function of, 206 and icing, 83, 86–87 and overtraining syndrome, 201–2 and sleep, 146–47 Immunoguard, 167, 168 inflammation floating and, 125 icing and, 83–84 in long-term recovery, 77 placebo effect and, 236, 237 in recovery process, 84–89 TB12 sleepwear and, 140, 141 Informed Choice program, 177, 179 infrared radiation, 107, 109 infrared sauna, 105–9, 242, 247, 248 Ingraham, Paul, 110, 112 injury(-ies) mental stress and, 127 nutritional supplement use and, 179–82 and recovery mind-set, 121–22 rest and recovery to prevent, 251, 254 RICE therapy for, 81 sleep deprivation and, 146 training load and, 218–20 Inkinen, Sami, 228–29, 283n.13 Inside Sports (television series), 279n.20 Inside Tracker, 206–10, 214 insomnia, 149 Instagram, 8, 80 International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF), 281n.2 International Olympic Committee, 163, 178, 183–84, 269n.20 International Society of Sports Nutrition (ISSN), 169–71 intuition, 255–56 Iraq, invasion of (2003), 54 iron, 206, 277n.1 Ironman 70.3 world championship, 227–28 Ironman European Championship, 47 Ironman triathlons, 73, 165 Isotar, 37 ISSN (International Society of Sports Nutrition), 169–71 ITU World Triathlon, 196 Ivy, John, 59–61, 267n.3 Jack3d, 180, 280n.23 Jacobs, Gilad, 117 Jacobs, Howard, 176–77, 278n.11, 278n.12 Jacobs, Laura, 117–18 James, LeBron, 80, 157, 269n.1 jet lag, 158–59 Jetlagrooster.com, 159 Jeukendrup, Asker, 64, 76 Jif, 71 Johnson, Shawn, 249 Johnson’s Hi Protein Food, 172 Joint ProMotion, 167, 168 Jordan, Michael, 32–33 Journal of the American Medical Association, 46 Jovanovic, Pavle, 179, 279n.20 Joyner, Michael, 104, 211–13 “just-so” stories, 26–27 Kansas City Royals, 93 Kaptchuk, Ted, 239–40 Kastor, Deena, 191 kayakers, 222–23 Keflezighi, Meb, 191 Kenttä, Göran, 130, 222–23, 225–26, 273n.1 Kidd, Jason, 93 kidney function, 211 Kiely, John, 126–28 Kimes, Mina, 166 Kipling, Rudyard, 26–27 Kirui, Abel, 194–95 Kit’s Organic, 67 Kittelson, Kristina, 197–201 Klosser, Mike, 224 Knepper, Mark, 51, 53–54 Kopecky, Elyse, 74, 75 Korem, Erik, 144–45 Krombacher, 14 Lacera, Jorge, 143, 275n.2 lactate, 104, 110–11, 120 lactic acid, 104, 111, 112, 118, 125 LA Galaxy, 165 LaLanne, Jack, 171 Leadbetter, Gig, 15–21, 25, 26 Lean Machine, 14 Lieto, Chris, 193 Lilly, John C., 123 Lindgren, Gerry, 41 listening to your body, 74, 200, 227, 229–32, 251–52, 255–56 liver failure, acute, 280n.25 London Marathon, 186, 187, 191–92 London Olympic Games (2012), 69 long-term recovery, 76–77, 90–91 Loring, Meredith, 283n.13 Los Angeles Kings, 94 Los Angeles Lakers, 80, 152, 157 Los Angeles Marathon, 187 Los Angeles Olympics Games (1984), 61, 285n.14 Los Angeles Rams, 94 low-fat foods, 71–72 Lucero, Cynthia, 46 Lucozade Sport, 37 Macdonald, Graham Z., 272n.8 Madonna, 82 Magness, Steve, 148, 195, 226, 227, 244, 247 Mah, Cheri, 151, 152 Mahon, Terrence, 191–92 Major League Baseball (MLB), 84, 110, 279n.13 Major League Soccer (MLS), 135, 165, 279n.13 Manhattan Project, 266n.1 MapMyRun, 226 marathon runners; See also specific races hydration for, 42, 43 hyponatremia for, 46–47 icing for, 82 overtraining syndrome for, 192–94 recovery regimes of, 253–56 Marc Pro, 2 marketing of nutritional supplements, 171, 173–75, 184 of postexercise refueling products, 67, 72 of sports drinks, 35, 41 storytelling in, 32–33 Martin, David, 234–35, 239, 240 massage, 109–15, 242–43, 250, 253 Massey University, 29 masters athletes, overtraining for, 197–201 Maxade, 38 Maxwell, Brian, 56–58 Maxwell, Jennifer, 56–58, 71–72 Mayo Clinic, 104, 211 Mazières, David, 174 McDonald’s, 67–70 McHugh, Malachy, 92 McMaster University, 32, 65, 162 McNamara fallacy, 215 M.E.D.

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Instead of comparing a product to what athletes would otherwise consume, they compare some new nutritional product against exercising on empty. Cohen argues that’s not a fair test of the product’s benefits in real-world conditions. Some of the dazzling powers that sports drinks display in the studies touted by their makers may be nothing more than the placebo effect. When people volunteer for a study to test a new sports drink, they come to it with an expectation that the product will have some performance benefit. Studies use a placebo group to factor out such effects, but a placebo only controls for these expectations when it’s indistinguishable from the real deal.

Alchemy: The Dark Art and Curious Science of Creating Magic in Brands, Business, and Life
by Rory Sutherland
Published 6 May 2019

The assistance of doctors (whether witch or NHS), exotic potions (whether homeopathic or antibiotic) or the caring presence of relatives and friends can all create this illusion, yet policymakers hate the idea of any solution that involves such unconscious processes – too little is spent on researching the placebo effect in proportion to its importance.* Understanding the placebo effect is a useful way to begin to understand other forms of unconscious influence; it explains why we often behave in apparently irrational ways in order to influence unconscious processes – both our own and those of others. Additionally, our reluctance to exploit the placebo effect may offer some clues about our wider reluctance to adopt psychological solutions to problems, particularly when they are slightly counterintuitive or not conventionally logical. Let me explain. The placebo effect, like many other forms of alchemy, is an attempt to influence the mind or body’s automatic processes.

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‘. . . or instruction needed.”, Don Norman, The Design of Everyday Things (1988). ‘In the word of Jonathan Haidt . . .’ The Righteous Mind (2012). ‘. . . offered a possible evolutionary explanation.’, Colin Barras, ‘Evolution could explain the placebo effect’, New Scientist (6 September 2012). ‘. . . and more by our perception of it’, ‘The Vodka-Red-Bull Placebo Effect’, Atlantic (8 June 2017). ‘. . . the father of ‘Nudge Theory’, Richard Thaler’ Richard H. Thaler and Cass R. Sunstein, Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness (2008). ‘. . . often outdone by the taste of the latter’.’, Lucas Derks and Jaap Hollander, Essenties van NLP (1996)

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Uncovering Our Unconscious Motivations 1.5: The Real Reason We Clean Our Teeth 1.6: The Right Thing for the Wrong Reason 1.7: How You Ask the Question Affects the Answer 1.8: ‘A Change in Perspective Is Worth 80 IQ Points’ 1.9: Be Careful with Maths: Or Why the Need to Look Rational Can Make You Act Dumb 1.10: Recruitment and Bad Maths 1.11: Beware of Averages 1.12: What Gets Mismeasured Gets Mismanaged 1.13: Biased about Bias 1.14: We Don’t Make Choices as Rationally as We Think 1.15: Same Facts, Different Context 1.16: Success Is Rarely Scientific – Even in Science 1.17: The View Back Down the Mountain: The Reasons We Supply for Our Experimental Successes 1.18: The Overuse of Reason 1.19: An Automatic Door Does Not Replace a Doorman: Why Efficiency Doesn’t Always Pay 2: An Alchemist’s Tale (Or Why Magic Really Still Exists) 2.1: The Great Upside of Abandoning Logic – You Get Magic 2.2: Turning Lead into Gold: Value Is in the Mind and Heart of the Valuer 2.3: Turning Iron and Potatoes into Gold: Lessons from Prussia 2.4: The Modern-Day Alchemy of Semantics 2.5: Benign Bullshit – and Hacking the Unconscious 2.6: How Colombians Re-Imagined Lionfish (With a Little Help from Ogilvy and the Church) 2.7: The Alchemy of Design 2.8: Psycho-Logical Design: Why Less Is Sometimes More 3: Signalling 3.1: Prince Albert and Black Cabs 3.2: A Few Notes on Game Theory 3.3: Continuity Probability Signalling: Another Name for Trust 3.4: Why Signalling Has to Be Costly 3.5: Efficiency, Logic and Meaning: Pick Any Two 3.6: Creativity as Costly Signalling 3.7: Advertising Does Not Always Look Like Advertising: The Chairs on the Pavement 3.8: Bees Do It 3.9: Costly Signalling and Sexual Selection 3.10: Necessary Waste 3.11: On the Importance of Identity 3.12: Hoverboards and Chocolate: Why Distinctiveness Matters 4: Subconscious Hacking: Signalling to Ourselves 4.1: The Placebo Effect 4.2: Why Aspirin Should Be Reassuringly Expensive 4.3: How We Can ‘Hack’ What We Can’t Control 4.4: ‘The Conscious Mind Thinks It’s the Oval Office, When in Reality It’s the Press Office’ 4.5: How Placebos Help Us Recalibrate for More Benign Conditions 4.6: The Hidden Purposes Behind Our Behaviour: Why We Buy Clothes, Flowers or Yachts 4.7: On Self-Placebbing 4.8: What Makes an Effective Placebo?

Sex, Lies, and Pharmaceuticals: How Drug Companies Plan to Profit From Female Sexual Dysfunction
by Ray Moynihan and Barbara Mintzes
Published 1 Oct 2010

, 16 fundamentally flawed, 192 and gap between science and marketing of (see gap between science and marketing of FSD) and ‘insufficiency’ syndromes, 3, 74–5, 78, 104 its existence a central message of industry-sponsored ‘education,’ 109 and the Journal of Sexual Medicine, 114–6, 186–7 female sexual ‘dysfunction’ (FSD) (Cont.) and the making of a new medical condition, xi and male sexual pressure, 200–1 marketing of (see marketing female sexual ‘dysfunction’) a million dollar market waiting to happen, 118 Pfizer currently has no plans to develop medicines for, 175 and the placebo effect (see placebo effect) and problematic nature of definitions, 53–6, 197–8, 201–6 and ‘unmet need,’ 45, 48, 50, 111, 181–2, 197 Female Sexual Dysfunction Online, 106–7 Female Sexual Function Index, 80–5, 105 female sexuality, 5–6, 7, 24, 54, 196, 208 and differences with male sexuality, 200 and the Hite Report, 30 physical aspects of influenced by animal studies, 74–5 female sexuality and the flawed medical model, 190–201 and call to abandon the label, 198–9 the ‘drive’ model, 191–3 and inhibited sexual desire, 191 lack of interest not regarded as problem for women, 196–7 and sexual desire in women, 195–6 and spontaneous desire, 192 female sexual pleasure, 8, 23, 77, 86, 176, 196, 210 attempts to measure, 67, 68–9, 78–9 misunderstanding of, 41 flibanserin (Boehringer’s HSDD drug), 176–83, 204–5 Freud, Sigmund, 22–3, 25 and clitoridal sexuality, 23, 208 misunderstood female sexual pleasure, 41 and ‘vaginal’ orgasm, 23 frigidity, 23–4, 27, 30, 208 FSD. see female sexual ‘dysfunction’ gap between science and marketing of FSD, 197–8, 201–6 genital blood flow, 27, 33, 35, 86, 111, 158, 180 attempts to enhance, 11, 16, 55, 73, 78, 81, 105, 159, 209 measurement of, 74, 75–6, 78–9, 86, 192 and sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 56, 69, 74, 101, 104, 134, 137, 180, 205 and Viagra, 45, 73, 81, 159 genital gel for women, 16, 34, 176 ghost writing, 189 Godlee, Dr Fiona (editor British Medical Journal), 213 Goldstein, Dr Irwin, 36–7, 75, 169, 187–8, 190, 196, 209 an editor of Women’s Sexual Function and Dysfunction, 49 and animal studies and women’s sexual arousal, 74 and award from World Association for Sexual Health, 209 and claims regarding extent of female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 63 and the daily use of Viagra, 102–3 as editor-in-chief of Journal of Sexual Medicine, 63 and flibanserin trials, 176 and gap between science and marketing of FSD, 201–2 has consulted for pharmaceutical companies, 103 and the International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health, 110 and labelling of HSDD, 186 and Massachusetts Male Aging Study, 128 and medical practitioners’ accredited education programs, 100, 104 as ‘thought leader,’ 167, 176 and Viagra for women, 157–60 Grassley, Senator Chuck, 214–5 Halpern (PR firm), 178, 179 Healthy Scepticism, 211 Hill and Knowlton, testosterone patch and, 149 Hite, Shere, 30, 200 criticises definitions of FSD, 40–2 and role of partner in sexual dissatisfaction of women, 82–3 Hite Report, 30 HIV/AIDS, 46, 142–3 homosexuality, 22, 46 hormone ‘deficiency,’ 3, 104, 205 hormone levels, 35, 75–7, 86, 160 hormone replacement therapy, 154, 159 hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD), 19, 61–3, 86, 147, 177–204 see also Boehringer’s marketing campaign for flibanserin; female sexual ‘dysfunction’ (FSD); testosterone patch for women and Boehringer survey, 62–3 and calls for it to be abandoned, 204 and Decreased Sexual Desire Screener, 87–9 defined by expert opinion not scientific data, 179–80 not a medical disorder, 192–6 and oestrogen levels, 76–7 and P & G program: Renewing Sexual Desire: Understanding HSDD in Postmenopausal Women, 105–6 and testosterone levels, 75–6 impotence, 122–45 see also ‘erectile dysfunction’ implications of its displacement by the term ‘erectile “dysfunction”’, 132–5 seen as a judgemental term, 123 and social stereotypes of male sexuality, 131–2 ‘ inhibited sexual desire,’ 191 Institute of Medicine and reform of health professional/ pharmaceutical relationship, 212 ‘insufficiency’ syndromes, 3, 74–5, 78, 104 International Academy of Sex Research, 34 International Society for Sexual Medicine, 116 International Society for the Study of Women’s Sexual Health, 110 internet, 81, 109, 217 internet marketing of drugs, 215–6 Intrinsa (testosterone patch for women), 164 Johnson, Ericka (Swedish researcher), 131, 132–4 Johnson, Virginia. see Masters and Johnson Journal of Sexual Medicine, 114–6, 186–7 Journal of the American Medical Association, 49, 54 and criticism of pharmaceutical industry financial support, 213 and frigidity, 23 and the 43 per cent claim of female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 42–6 ‘key opinion leaders,’ 91, 92, 97, 100, 126, 213 see also ‘thought leaders’ King, Dr Michael, 58, 59 Kinsey (film), 29, 31 Kinsey, Alfred, 24–5, 28–9, 41, 46, 55, 74, 192 and role of hormones, 77–8 Kinsey Institute survey, 73 and female dissatisfaction not physically based, 53–6 Klein, Naomi, 17 Kohl, Senator Herb, 214–5 Laan, Dr Ellen and ‘Cape Cod’ meeting, 194 and capture of sexual medicine by doctors, 193 and rejection of HSDD as medical disorder, 192–6, 205–6 labelling of disorders, 6–7, 55–8, 89, 168, 184, 190, 200, 215, 218, xi benefits of, 4 and ‘female orgasmic disorder,’ 19 and ‘frigidity,’ 24 and marketing of, 9, 31, 42, 70, 88, 181–2, 211, x–xi Lakartidningen (Swedish medical journal), 133 The Lancet, 143 La Revue Prescrire gives lowest rating to testosterone patch, 166 Laumann, Ed, Chicago University, 45–52, 59–61 as author of article in Journal of he American Medical Association, 45–6 and scientific testing of survey questions, 66 and survey on sexual behaviour of Americans, 46 Leiblum, Sandra, 2 rejects 43 per cent female sexual ‘dysfunction’ finding, 49 Levitra (drug), 125, 126 ‘lies’ and pharmaceutical marketing, x ‘lifestyle’ drugs, 39, 134, 140–1, 142 links between pharmaceutical industry and medical community. see relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community little blue pill. see Viagra Loe, Dr Meika and continuing medical education (CME) seminar, 101 The Rise of Viagra, 140 low desire. see hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) low libido. see hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) magnetic resonance imaging machines (MRIs), 78 male sexual desire, 200 marketing female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 1–4, 6–7, 62 see also Boehringer’s marketing campaign for flibanserin; claims of the prevalence of female sexual ‘dysfunction’; ‘education’ of medical practitioners and construction of a scientific justification, 6 and exaggerated pharmaceutical claims, 63 fits broader pattern of disease promotion, 13 and industry manufacture of new norms, 12 inflated estimates of ‘dysfunction’ can create impression of ‘epidemic,’ 67 and internet, 215–6 as ‘lies,’ x and merging with medical science, (see relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community) and Twitter and Facebook, 216 and unmet need, 62, 67, 90, 203 marketing male sexual ‘dysfunction’ worth billions to industry, 17 marketing of Viagra, 124–35 and sexual performance anxiety, 143–4 shifts to performance enhancement, 124–6, 142 and social stereotypes of male sexuality, 131–2 targets healthy men, 140–1 Viagra as essential sexual accessory, 31 Massachusetts Male Aging Study, 128 Masters, William. see Masters and Johnson Masters and Johnson, 26–30, 75, 190, 196 and causes of sexual problems, 27–8 masturbation, 22, 26, 151, 175 measuring female sexual pleasure. see diagnostic testing for female sexual ‘dysfunction’ medicalisation of common sexual difficulties, 1–2, 15–43, 47, 52–6, 192–6 common problems categorised as ‘dysfunctions,’ 53–6 creating markets for lifestyle drugs, 39 and female insecurity, 6 history of treatment approaches, 22–43 ‘In Pursuit of the Perfect Penis,’ 34 overestimates of female ‘dysfunction,’ 44–52 and rejection of (see non-medical approaches to female sexual problems) as a result of the 43 per cent female sexual ‘dysfunction’ finding, 49 tide turning against, 205–7 and the waning of sexual interest, 29 medical labelling. see labelling of disorders medical practitioners. see ‘education’ of medical practitioners; relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community medical professional accreditation and sponsorship by pharmaceutical industry, 98–106 medical science merging with pharmaceutical marketing, ix systemically pro-drug, 10 merging of marketing and medical science. see relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community Meston, Dr Cindy and placebo effect as a ‘difficulty,’ 167–9 Midlands Therapeutics Review and Advisory Committee recommends against testosterone patch, 164 Mitchell, Kirstin, 66 National Academies of Science, 212 New England Research Institute, 209 The New Scientist and the testosterone patch, 149 New View campaign, 101, 148, 202, 208, 211, 216 see also non-medical approaches to female sexual problems; Tiefer, Dr Leonore New York Times, 49, 160 No Free Lunch, 211 No Logo, 17 non-medical approaches to female sexual problems, 4–5, 11, 20–2, 109, 157, 184, 190–206, 216–8 see also New View campaign online ‘education’ of medical practitioners, 106–7 orgasm, 1, 2, 19, 21, 32, 78, 150–1, 170, 208, 231 and Female Sexual Dysfunction, 40, 47, 52–4, 60–1, 65, 70, 81, 84, 178, 201 and Freud, 23–4 and Hite, 30, 40–2 and Kinsey, 24 and Masters and Johnson, 26–7, 190–1 and non-drug therapies, 175 vaginal, 23–4 and Viagra, 158 Orgasm Inc.

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(documentary), 17, 221 pain, 1, 12, 28, 64, 111, 165 everyday, as medical disorder, 18 as female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 2, 19, 40, 47, 52, 81, 84, 178, 190–1, 197 and Kinsey Institute, 54 and non-drug therapies, 175, 217 and Viagra, 158 Parry, Vince, 17 Pfizer, 3, 115, 121, 125 and disclosure of funding of medical education activities, 214 and ‘educating’ medical practitioners, 91–7, 100, 104–5, 110, 114 and funding research and conferences, 37, 49–50, 60–1, 85 has no current plans to develop FSD medicines, 175 and healthcare fraud case, 118–20 and inducements and kickbacks, 38, 119 and ‘key opinion leaders,’ 112 and new ‘corporate integrity agreement,’ 120 and US AIDS HealthCare Foundation lawsuit, 143 and the US Department of Justice, 92, 113 and US Food and Drug Administration, 142 and Viagra, 31, 33–4, 102–3, 124, 126–7, 131–3, 135 and Viagra for women, 3, 158–60 Pfizer Foundation Hall for Humanism in Medicine, 100 pharmaceutical industry. see also Boehringer; Pfizer; Procter & Gamble; relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community attempting to shape sexual concerns, 187 blurs lines between promotion and education, 93, 97 and ‘disease development,’ 17 and drug testing, 11 and financial support for medical journals, 114 fosters creation of medical disorders (see medicalisation of common sexual difficulties) and funding of scientific surveys, 62 funding supports the science of sexual medicine, 116–7 and ghost writing, 189 hungry for new markets, 2 and inflated estimates of female sexual ‘dysfunction’ (see claims of the prevalence of female sexual ‘dysfunction’) and ‘lifestyle’ market, 39 marketing machines, 90 and marketing sexual disorders, 12 and maximising markets for drug solutions, 194 primary aim is to expand markets for medicines, 112 and problems with placebo-controlled tests, 11 and role in defining disease, 15–7 sees the placebo effect as an enemy, 175 selling sickness and disease, 2 and the sponsored creation of a disease, 40 and use of statistics, 153 Pharmacia (pharmaceutical company), 119 Physicians Payment Sunshine Act, 214–5 placebo effect, 11, 86, 150–2, 158–76, 217 an obstacle to be overcome, 169 and Dr Anita Clayton’s plan to resolve, 169–75 and Dr Cindy Meston, 167–9 drugs unable to beat the placebo, 167 and flibanserin, 204–5 a regulatory problem not a failure of medicine, 170–2, 174 seen as an enemy by the pharmaceutical industry, 175 premature ejaculation, 207 prevalence, claimed, of female sexual ‘dysfunction.’ see claims of the prevalence of female sexual ‘dysfunction’ Procter & Gamble (P&G), 3 and ‘education of medical practitioners, 105–14 global survey, 61–2 marketing campaign for testosterone patch for women, 149 sells out of pharmaceutical business, 166 and testosterone patches for women, 85–6, 100, 147–66, 197 professional medical accreditation and sponsorship by pharmaceutical industry, 98–106 Profile of Female Sexual Function, 86 psychometrics. see questionnaires to diagnose ‘dysfunction’ Public Citizen (consumer watchdog), 155 questionnaires to diagnose ‘dysfunction,’ 79–90 and concern they oversimplify complex problems, 89–90 and ‘reliability’ and ‘validity,’ 82 testing pharmaceutical agents a driver of, 83 reform of financial relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community and, 211–5 relationships between pharmaceutical industry and medical community, 7, 9–10, 13, 17, 186 can unduly influence practitioners, 13–4 and Cape Cod meeting, 32–6, 42 dangers of mixing marketing and science, 59 the development of ‘sexual medicine,’ 32, 37–9 and the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 19 emerging unease with, 13 financial, 32–8, 91–121, 210–5 and Physicians Payment Sunshine Act, 214–5 and public concern with, 116–7 as ‘public-private’ partnerships, 117–8 and reform of financial links, 211–5 and sponsored seminars, 9 Renewing Sexual Desire: Understanding HSDD in Postmenopausal Women (P &G accredited program), 105–6 Richters, Dr Juliet, University of New South Wales, 65 Robert Wood, Johnson Medical School, 33 Rosen, Dr Ray, 105, 173, 194, 196, 202 and approaches to treating sexual problems, 33 author of article in Journal of he American Medical Association, 49–50 and ‘Cape Cod’ meeting, 33–6, 42 and diagnostic questionnaires, 80–5 gives evidence at FDA hearings into testosterone patch, 155–6 and online education of medical practitioners, 106–7 and Procter and Gamble global survey, 62 and Procter and Gamble medical education program, 105–6 as ‘thought leader,’ 167 and wellness approach, 209–10 Sauers, Joan, 217 science of FSD. see sexual medicine ‘scientific’ surveys. see also questionnaires to diagnose ‘dysfunction’ confuse self-reported problems with medical disorder, 66 and funding by pharmaceutical industry, 62 The Second Sex. see de Beauvoir, Simone selling sickness, 2 Selling Sickness: How drug companies are turning us all into patients, ix serotonin, 180 Sex and the City, 5 sexual ‘dysfunction’ in women. see female sexual ‘dysfunction’ Sexual Function Questionnaire, 85 sexualisation of girl children, 5 sexual medicine. see also labelling of disorders; medicalisation of common sexual difficulties and ‘Cape Cod’ meeting, 36 driven by pharmaceutical industry profit motive, 9 emergence of, 8–9, 31–2 entangled in a web of financial relationships, 9 and female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 7–9 and focus on sexual difficulties as ‘dysfunction’, 38 funded by pharmaceutical industry, 116–7 often ignores patient, 10 patient surveys, 7 and technology, 68–78 sexual performance, 1, 25, 31, 114, 141, 143 and anxiety due to marketing, 144 sexual problems. see also female sexual ‘dysfunction’ (FSD); female sexuality and the flawed medical model; medicalisation of common sexual difficulties are they ‘dysfunctions’?

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, 52–9 and ‘bio-psycho-social’ approach to treatment, 33 history of treatment approaches to, 22–43 and improved physical relations, 42 and inflated estimates of (see claims of the prevalence of female sexual ‘dysfunction’) and ‘labelling’ (see labelling of disorders) move from therapy and counselling to medical solutions, 31 and the role for medicines, 55 role of Viagra, 31 and solutions to, 29 (see also non-medical approaches to female sexual problems) sexual science. see sexual medicine side-effects, 21, 55, 154 of testosterone, 149, 151, 165, 183, 204–5 of Viagra, 137–8, 158, 160 of Viagra for women, 160 sildenafil (drug), 105, 143 Soule, Dr Lisa (FDA medical officer), 153 Stephens, Darby (research manager at Vivus), 15–6, 37, 43 ‘Swedish Viagra man,’ 131, 143 testosterone patch for women, 85–6, 100, 105–6, 147–57, 160–6 see also hypoactive sexual desire disorder (HSDD) criticised by independent research groups, 164–6 licensed in Europe, 164 and The New Scientist, 149 and the placebo effect (see placebo effect) Procter & Gamble’s application rejected, 163 sold as Intrinsa, 164 still not approved in US, 176 ‘thought leaders,’ 16, 36–7, 40, 97, 167 see also ‘key opinion leaders’ Tiefer, Dr Leonore, 4–5, 11, 20, 29, 146, 163, 203, 208 see also New View campaign and animal models and female sexual difficulties, 75 and concerns of emerging alliance between medical profession and pharmaceutical industry, 34–5, 117 and continuing medical education seminar, 101 and the daily use of Viagra, 103–4 and diagnostic measuring, 70 documents sponsorships, 40 and Dr John Dean, 185 and HSDD, 148, 181 and International Academy of Sex Research, 34 and male spontaneous desire, 200 and the medical takeover of sex, 39 reconsiders plan to shut down New View campaign, 209 rejects label of ‘sexual medicine,’ 117 rejects 43 per cent female sexual ‘dysfunction’ finding, 49 and ‘scientific’ questionnaires as measurement tools, 87 and US Food and Drug Administration approval hearings for testosterone patch, 148, 155–7 and the ‘Viagra phenomenon,’ 134–6 ultrasound, 8, 69–70, 74, 90, 104 University Medical College, 196–7 ‘unmet need’ and female sexual ‘dysfunction,’ 45, 48, 50, 111, 181–2, 197 urologists and Viagra, 135–6 US AIDS HealthCare Foundation and lawsuit against Pfizer, 143 US Department of Justice and Pfizer, 92, 113, 118–21 US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and approval hearings for testosterone patch for women, 147–57, 160–3 criticised for being influenced by drug companies, 154 and encouragement of drug company funding of measurement tools, 84 and role of questionnaire results, 174 and Viagra advertisement, 142 ‘vaginal engorgement insufficiency,’ 3, 74 vaginal orgasm, 23–4 vaginismus, 12, 19 Vaisman, Dr Jack (chief executive Advanced Medical Institute), 207 Viagra, 29, 31–2, 55, 69, 122–45 see also ‘erectile dysfunction’; impotence and AIDS groups concerns, 142 and Bob Dole, 124 as a crutch, 139–40 and daily use of, 102–3 and difficulty in testing on women, 32 and Division J, special sales force, 94 effectiveness of, 136–8 and the emergence of ‘sexual medicine,’ 31–2 and gay community, 142 and impact on relationships, 138–40 increases blood flow, 73 a ‘lifestyle’ drug, 134, 142 marketing of (see marketing of Viagra) and public funding in Sweden, 133–4 and ‘recreational’ use, 140–3 relaxes blood vessels, 124 and role of urologists, 135–6 and Sex and the City, 40 and Sexual Function Questionnaire, 85 and side effects of, 137–8, 158, 160 a symbol of masculinity, 132 and US Food and Drug Administration, 142 The Viagra Ad Venture (Jay Baglia), 143 Viagra for women, 157–60, 175, 180, 209 Vioxx (anti-arthritis drug), 154 Vivus (pharmaceutical company), 15–16, 34, 176 Watson (pharmaceutical company), 100 Wizzard (communications firm), 183 Wolfe, Dr Sid and evidence to FDA testosterone patch hearings, 155 World Association for Sexual Health, 209 World Health Organisation (WHO), 130, 131 Zonagen (pharmaceutical company), 84 RAY MOYNIHAN has been investigating the business of health care as a journalist for over a decade.

Randomistas: How Radical Researchers Changed Our World
by Andrew Leigh
Published 14 Sep 2018

When medical researchers see a change in outcomes among people who have only taken sugar pills, they call it ‘the placebo effect’. Early research on the placebo effect turns out to have overstated the power of placebos, wrongly conflating the natural tendency of patients to recover with the impact of placebos. Modern researchers now doubt that the placebo effect actually helps our bodies heal faster. But it does seem to affect self-reported impacts, such as pain.38 For alleviating discomfort, the placebo effect works in surprising ways. For example, placebo injections produce a larger effect than placebo pills.39 Even the colour of a tablet changes the way in which patients perceive its effect.

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Petersburg Times 60 Stark, William 16 Stewart, Matthew, and The Management Myth 138 Stigler, Stephen 50 Street Narcotics Unit experiment 92–3 streptomycin trial 56 see also Austin Bradford Hill Sullivan, Andrew, and Pyrotron 14 Suskind, Dana 70 Syed, Matthew 142 teacher payment trial 111 see also Karthik Muralidharan Telford, Dick 201–2 text messages, and use of 9, 78, 82, 123, 154 textbook trial 123–4 see also Karthik Muralidharan The Battered Women’s Movement 89 the book of Daniel 22 ‘the brevia’ and ‘the scrutiny’ 181 the ‘gold standard’ 194 The Lancet 24, 55, 120 The Matrix 30 ‘the paradox of choice’ 195 the placebo effect see placebo effect ‘the Super Bowl impossibility theorem’ 140 Thirty Million Words initiative 79–80 ‘three strikes’ law’ 99, 101 ‘Triple P’ positive parenting program 68–9 ‘True Love Waits’ program 47 Trump campaign 154 Tseng, Yi-Ping 37 see also ‘Journey to Social Inclusion’ UK Department for International Development 103 unemployment 36, 44–6, 78, 103 see also German government unemployment incentive; job training programs; ‘universal basic income’ ‘universal basic income’ 46 University of Chicago, and ‘Science of Philanthropy Initiative’ 159 University of London 54 University of Queensland, and ‘Triple P’ positive parenting program 68 University of Wollongong 187 US Agency for International Development 103, 210 US Behavioural Insights Team 186 see also Elizabeth Linos US Congressional Budget Office 194 US National Academy panel 100 US Police Foundation 89 ‘verbal bombardment’ and Perry Preschool 67 Vienna General Hospital 24–5 see also Ignaz Semmelweis Vietnam war draft 42–3 Virgin Atlantic Airways 136 ‘virginity pledges’ in the US 46–7 Wagner, Dan 159 Waiting for Superman 79 Washington Post 7 Washington Times 60 Weikart, David 66–7, 71 West Heidelberg centre 71 What Works Clearinghouse 76–7, 208 Western Union 130 Wilson, James 184–5 Wootton, David 26, 203–4 and Bad Medicine 26 World Bank 103, 111 World Health Organization 112–13, 115, 199 World Medical Association 186 Wydick, Bruce 114–15 Yale University, and Innovations for Poverty Action 123 YouWiN!

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But sometimes counterfactuals aren’t as obvious. Suppose you decide to treat a bad headache by taking a painkiller and going to bed. If you wake up in the morning feeling better, you’d be unwise to give the tablet all the credit. Perhaps the headache would have gone away by itself. Or maybe the act of taking a pill was enough – the placebo effect. The problem gets more difficult when you realise that we sometimes seek help when we’re at a low point. Most sick people recover by themselves – so if you want to find out the effect of going to the doctor, it would be ridiculous to assume that the counterfactual is having a runny nose for the rest of your life.

The Unpersuadables: Adventures With the Enemies of Science
by Will Storr
Published 1 Jan 2013

One study has even indicated that the unspoken thoughts of your doctor can alter the efficacy of pain-relief drugs. More recent research suggests that the placebo effect might even work when we know that our medication is pharmacologically useless. In one small study, Professor Ted Kaptchuk of the Harvard Medical School arranged for thirty-seven patients with irritable bowel syndrome to take an inert pill twice a day. Even though they were informed that the treatment worked only ‘through the placebo effect’, these participants reported almost double the improvement of a forty-three-strong control group, who received nothing. If this experiment proves satisfactorily replicable, it will suggest that even when we know a drug to be bogus, the very act of being treated, of swallowing something, of being caught in the ritual of science and authority and focused attention, can still trigger our body’s various neurochemical healing tools.

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Summer, ‘On the efficacy of alcohol placebos in inducing feelings of intoxication’, Psychopharmacology 15, nos. 1–2 (1994). 42 why completely fake drugs can benefit the symptoms: This list is a compilation of all the sources noted in this section, as well as Dylan Evans, Placebo, HarperCollins, 2004; and Ben Goldacre, Bad Science, 4th Estate, 2008. 42 athletes go faster: Thomas Trojian and Christopher Beedie, ‘Placebo Effect and Athletes’, Current Sports Medicine Reports, July–August 2008. 42 for longer: C. J. Beedie, D. A. Coleman and A. J. Foad, ‘Positive and negative placebo effects resulting from the deceptive administration of an ergogenic aid’, International Journal of Sport, Nutrition, Exercise and Metabolism, 17 June 2007. 42 with less pain: F. Benedetti, A. Pollo and L. Colloca, ‘Opioid-mediated placebo responses boost pain endurance and physical performance – is it doping in sport competitions?’

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Wechsler, M.D. et al., ‘Active Albuterol or Placebo, Sham Acupuncture, or No Intervention in Asthma’, New England Journal of Medicine, 14 July 2011. 42 four sugar pills: D. E. Moerman, ‘Cultural variations in the placebo effect: ulcers, anxiety & blood pressure’, Medical Anthropology Quarterly, 2000. 42 sham injections work better: A. J. de Craen, J. G. Tijssen, J. de Gans and J. Kleijnen, ‘Placebo effect in the acute treatment of migraine: subcutaneous placebos are better than oral placebos’, Journal of Neurology, March 2000. 42 capsules work better: M. Z. Hussain, ‘Effect of shape of medication in treatment of anxiety states’, British Journal of Psychiatry 120 (1972). 42 big pills work better: L.

Healing_Back_Pain__The_Mind.pdf
by Unknown

In thinking about how to review the subject it occurred to me that the best approach might be to consider each treatment modality from the standpoint of its intended purpose. Of course, all treatments are supposed to relieve pain but the important question is how. What is the rationale for each treatment? Before we get into this let’s review once more the subject of the placebo effect because 120 The Traditional (Conventional) Treatments 121 of its crucial importance in any discussion of treatment. THE PLACEBO EFFECT A placebo is any treatment that produces a good therapeutic result despite the fact it has no intrinsic therapeutic value. A sugar pill is the classic example. It is clear that the desirable outcome must be attributed to the ability of the mind to manipulate the various organs and systems of the body.

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However, there is a real question whether this functions as anything but a placebo. A group at the Mayo Clinic published a study in 1978 in which they demonstrated that a placebo worked equally well (G. Thorsteinsson, H. H. Stonnington, G. K. Stillwell and L. R. Elveback, “The Placebo Effect of Transcutaneous Electrical Stimulation,” Pain, Vol. 5, p. 31). When there is prolonged relief as a result of any of these treatments one must suspect a placebo effect; there can be no other explanation, for they do not attack the cause of the problem. Treatments to Promote Relaxation To the prescribers of treatments to promote relaxation I would put the question, “To what end?

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Conceptually, prescribing physical therapy contradicts what we have found to be the only rational way to treat the problem; that is, by teaching, and thereby invalidating, the process where it begins— in the mind. Further, it had become obvious that some patients had put all their confidence in the physical therapy (or therapist) and were having placebo cures (see “The Placebo Effect”), which meant that sooner or later they would be in pain again. The principle is that one must renounce any structural explanation either for the pain or its cure, or the symptoms will continue. Manipulation, heat, massage, exercise and acupuncture all presuppose a physical disorder that can be treated by some physical means.

Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions
by Johann Hari
Published 1 Jan 2018

Whenever you take a drug, there’s always some placebo effect, on top of the effects of the chemicals. But how much? With powerful drugs, it’s always assumed to be a minor element. Guy thought the new antidepressants were an interesting place to try to figure this out—to see what small percentage of the effect is down to our belief in the drugs themselves. Irving and Guy both knew that if they started exploring this, they’d certainly find that most of the effect was chemical, but it would be intellectually interesting to look at the more minor placebo effect, too. So they started with a pretty simple plan.

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So all of these things are known.” And if you start experiencing these effects, it can be hard to stop—about 20 percent of people experience serious withdrawal symptoms.19 So, he says, “if you want to use something to get its placebo effect, at least use something that’s safe.” We could be giving people the herb St. John’s Wort, Irving says, and we’d have all the positive placebo effects and none of these drawbacks. Although—of course—St. John’s Wort isn’t patented by the drug companies, so nobody would be making much profit off it. By this time, Irving was starting, he told me softly, to feel “guilty” for having pushed those pills for all those years.

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For this and the next chapter, I also drew on (amongst many other studies): Irving Kirsch and Guy Sapirstein, “Listening to Prozac but Hearing Placebo: A Meta-Analysis of Antidepressant Medication,” Prevention & Treatment 1, no. 2 (June 1998); Kirsch, “Anti-depressants and the Placebo Effect,” Z Psychol 222, no 3 (2014): 128–134, doi: 10.1027/2151-2604/a000176; Kirsch, “Challenging Received Wisdom: Antidepressants and the Placebo Effect,” MJM 11, no. 2 (2008): 219–222, PMCID: PMC2582668; Kirsch et al., “Initial Severity and Antidepressant Benefits: A Meta-Analysis of Data Submitted to the Food and Drug Administration,” http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pmed.0050045; Kirsch et al., “The emperor’s new drugs: An analysis of antidepressant medication data submitted to the U.S.

This Will Make You Smarter: 150 New Scientific Concepts to Improve Your Thinking
by John Brockman
Published 14 Feb 2012

Because there are many settings in which people with a problem, given a placebo, report sizable improvement on average when they are queried (see #3), many scientists have accepted that “placebo effects”—of suggestion—are both substantial and widespread in the scope of what they benefit. The Danish researchers Asbjørn Hróbjartsson and Peter C. Götzsche conducted a systematic review of studies that compared a placebo to no treatment. They found that the placebo generally does . . . nothing. In most instances, there is no placebo effect. Mild “placebo effects” are seen, in the short term, for pain and anxiety. Placebo effects for pain are reported to be blocked by naloxone, an opiate antagonist—specifically implicating endogenous opiates in pain placebo effects, which would not be expected to benefit every possible outcome that might be measured. 3.

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Use of the term can then, far from fostering sound discourse, serve to undermine it. Take, for example, the “placebo” and “placebo effects.” Unpacking the terms, a placebo is defined as something physiologically inert but believed by the recipient to be active or possibly so. The term “placebo effect” refers to improvement of a condition when someone has received a placebo—improvement due to the effects of expectation/suggestion. With these terms ensconced in the vernacular, dece(i)bo effects associated with them are much in evidence. Key presumptions regarding placebos and placebo effects are more typically wrong than not. 1. When hearing the word “placebo,” scientists often presume “inert” without stopping to ask, What is that allegedly physiologically inert substance?

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The scientists attributed this to a placebo effect. But what’s to say that the subjects weren’t simply telling the scientists what they thought the scientists wished to hear? Denise Grady, writing for the New York Times, has noted: “Growing up, I got weekly hay fever shots that I don’t think helped me at all. But I kept hoping they would, and the doctor was very kind, so whenever he asked if I was feeling better, I said yes . . .” Such desire to please (a form, perhaps, of “social approval” reporting bias) made for fertile ground in which to operate and create what was interpreted as a placebo effect, which implies actual subjective benefit to symptoms.

If You're So Smart, Why Aren't You Happy?
by Raj Raghunathan
Published 25 Apr 2016

To those who are familiar with placebo effects, these results won’t come as a surprise. Placebo effects are so prevalent in medical contexts that any test of the effectiveness of a new drug involves comparing it with a control condition in which a placebo drug, like a sugar pill, is given to patients. What these placebo effects tell us is that our beliefs can shape our reality. If you think that a pill is going to cure a disease, there seems to be an objectively greater chance that it will cure the disease than if you think that it won’t. As it turns out—and here’s where it gets really interesting—placebo effects are not restricted to medical contexts; they occur in other contexts as well.

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Taylor, R. R. Lichtman, and J. V. Wood, “Attributions, Beliefs About Control, and Adjustment to Breast Cancer,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 46(3) (1984): 489–502. placebo effects: The most cited article on the placebo effect is by Beecher, which appeared in 1955. Although there are some questions about whether the original set of studies conducted by Beecher documented evidence for the placebo effect or some other effects (see, for example, Kienle and Kiene 1997), there is little doubt that the effect is believed to be prevalent, particularly in the medical domain (see Hróbjartsson & Norup 2003).

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Jonas, “Deconstructing the Placebo Effect and Finding the Meaning Response,” Annals of Internal Medicine 136(6) (2002): 471–76; B. E. Wampold et al., “The Placebo Is Powerful: Estimating Placebo Effects in Medicine and Psychotherapy from Randomized Clinical Trials,” Journal of Clinical Psychology 61(7) (2005): 835–54; A. Hróbjartsson and P. C. Gøtzsche, “Placebo Interventions for All Clinical Conditions,” Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews 1(1) (2010). Consider one study: L. Vase, M. E. Robinson, G. N. Verne, and D. D. Price, “The Contributions of Suggestion, Desire, and Expectation to Placebo Effects in Irritable Bowel Syndrome Patients: An Empirical Investigation,” Pain 105(1) (2003): 17–25.

How to Do the Work: Recognize Your Patterns, Heal From Your Past, and Create Your Self
by Nicole Lepera
Published 9 Mar 2021

They seemed more like miracles than anything scientifically valid. The mind can create real, measurable changes in the body—and the placebo effect is mainstream science’s recognition of this fact. A significant placebo effect has been documented in conditions ranging from Parkinson’s disease12 to irritable bowel syndrome.13 Some of the strongest responses have been observed in depression studies,14 where participants who believe they are on antidepressants but are really taking sugar pills report feeling generally improved. You don’t even need to be sick to experience the placebo effect. In a study at the University of Glasgow,15 researchers told fifteen runners that they were being administered doping drugs and then asked them to run a race.

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The biology of belief. 12.Fuente-Fernández, R. de la, & Stoessel, A. J. (2002). The placebo effect in Parkinson’s disease. Trends in Neurosciences, 25(6), 302–306. 13.Lu, C.-L., & Chang, F.-Y. (2011). Placebo effect in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Journal of Gastroenterology and Hepatology, 26(s3), 116–118. 14.Peciña, M., Bohnert, A. S., Sikora, M., Avery, E. T., Langenecker, S. A., Mickey, B.J., & Zubieta, J. K. (2015). Association between placebo-activated neural systems and antidepressant responses: Neurochemistry of placebo effects in major depression. JAMA Psychiatry, 72(11), 1087–1094. 15.Ross, R., Gray, C.

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Once we understand this, the more inadequate the traditional deterministic approach of “recircuiting” faulty wiring through interventions such as medicine and surgery seems. We can and should help heal our bodies and our minds to create wellness for ourselves. THE PLACEBO EFFECT The more I learned about epigenetics, the more I began studying the literature of healing and transformation. I learned about the power of belief and the placebo effect, which is a term that describes the power of an inert substance (such as a sugar pill) to improve symptoms of illness. I’ve been obsessed throughout my life with stories of spontaneous remission and people overcoming the most debilitating illnesses, seemingly impossible without medical intervention.

The End of Pain: How Nutrition and Diet Can Fight Chronic Inflammatory Disease
by Jacqueline Lagace
Published 7 Mar 2014

Seignalet was opposed to confining any patients in his studies to a control group and thereby excluding them from the benefits of his diet. The placebo effect Some people might think that Dr. Seignalet’s results could have been due to the placebo effect. A close look at the numerous studies carried out on the placebo effect clearly indicates that it is very variable and generally limited to subjective evaluations of pain.1 Also, meta-analyses of the placebo effect have provided a new perspective on the real value of placebos. A systematic review by A. Hróbjartsson and P. Gøtzsche of thirty-two clinical trials in a study including 3,795 patients, during which patients were randomly given either a placebo or no treatment, did not show any significant clinical effects of the placebo.

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The authors concluded that there was little evidence that, in general, placebos have a significant clinical effect.3 In another meta-analysis based on fifty-two new studies on the placebo effect, Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche4 once again concluded that they did not find any evidence of a significant, generalized clinical effect due to placebos. They did, however, agree that there could be a very small effect on certain patients, especially as far as pain is concerned. Other recent, well-controlled experimental studies targeting the duration of the placebo effect on pain reduction strongly suggest that the placebo effect is very short-lived.5 All these studies show that no placebo can produce a success rate of about 80 percent, like the rates obtained by Dr.

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Gingras, Les Aliments contre le cancer, Québec, Éditions du Trécarré, 2005, 213 p. 3. 3 Clinical Testing and Results 1. 2. L. Vase, J.L. Riley and D.D. Price, “A comparison of placebo effects in clinical analgesic trials versus studies of placebo analgesia,” Pain, vol. 99, 2002, p. 443–52. A. Hróbjartsson and P.C. Gøtzsche, “Is the placebo powerless?” New Engl J Med, vol. 344, 2001, p. 1594–99. < 225 2 2 6 > t h e e n d o f pa i n 3. L. Vase, J.L. Riley and D.D. Price, “A comparison of placebo effects in clinical analgesic trials versus studies of placebo analgesia,” Pain, vol. 99, 2002, p. 443–52. 4. A. Hróbjartsson and P.C. Gøtzsche, “Is the placebo powerless?

Quackery: A Brief History of the Worst Ways to Cure Everything
by Lydia Kang and Nate Pedersen
Published 16 Oct 2017

Terra sigillata distribution waned with the fall of the Classical world, not appearing again until it made its way back into Europe via the invading forces of the Ottoman Turks, who were convinced that a special clay from Armenia was a cure for the plague. Although ingesting Armenian clay would have been technically ineffective against the bacterial onslaught of the bubonic plague, the placebo effect of ingesting something sacred or special may indeed have contributed to the occasional recovery. One area the Turks occupied? The land around Striga (present-day Strzegom, Poland), where Andreas Berthold lived and worked as a miner. Quick, you’ve just been poisoned and have three choices for your terra sigillata antidote: silver, gold, or red.

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The dirt of choice for Southerners was clay, which does in fact have some medicinal qualities to it; depending on the source, it can have high levels of calcium, copper, magnesium, iron, and zinc, all of which are important for human health, and, in the case of pregnant women—who occasionally engaged in geophagy across cultural groups—crucial for it. The soils of West Africa and the American South happen to be rich in these minerals, which might explain the development and continuation of the practice. The placebo effect was boosted by aesthetics: From Lemnos to Striga, the pieces of terra sigillata were also beautiful objects, so much so that part of their efficacy could be attributed to the patient’s belief in a magical, almost talismanic quality of the little clay tablets. There was even a special magic that resulted from just being near terra sigillata.

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Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard used cautery to “wake people up” from deep comas (which technically wouldn't work—he probably just woke sleeping patients). Counterirritation via cautery was also used to treat melancholy and suspected werewolfism “when all other remedies fail.” Practitioners claimed it even cured headaches, sunstroke, and paralysis. Surely, though, cautery imparted a hefty placebo effect, or at least distraction from the actual problem. In 1610, Jacques Ferrand recommended cauterizing the forehead with a searing-hot iron for lovesickness. For swelling, a twelfth-century physician recommended no less than twenty burns all over the body, including the temples, chest, ankles, under the lip, collarbones, hips. . . .

Under the Knife: A History of Surgery in 28 Remarkable Operations
by Arnold van de Laar Laproscopic Surgeon
Published 1 Oct 2018

The great disadvantage of this is that the patient becomes increasingly labelled as a chronic sufferer, making the step back to a normal, healthy life more and more difficult. The placebo effect is nothing new. The walls of the Lady Chapel in the Cathedral of St John in the Dutch city of ’s-Hertogenbosch are adorned with votive offerings in silver or wax, in the form of small legs or arms, donated by grateful patients who have been cured of their diseases and ailments throughout the centuries. In the cave at Lourdes, where the Virgin Mary is alleged to have appeared to a young shepherdess, hang the crutches of cripples who found they could walk again. The placebo effect conforms to a number of rules. First, the patient must be convinced that it will work.

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The results showed that more than two-thirds of the patients displayed an improvement of their symptoms, irrespective of whether they had undergone the real or the fake operation. It is difficult to say to what extent the placebo effect contributes to the success of surgery in general. It is probably more significant than we think. Fortunately, thanks to double-blind, randomised placebo-controlled testing, operations like that performed on Alan B. Shepard, which have purely a placebo effect, are performed less and less frequently. In the past, however, the outcomes of operations were not systematically recorded and the scientific publication of surgical results was usually limited to descriptions of successful individual cases rather than presenting average figures for large groups of patients.

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A surgical procedure therefore has all the potential to be a powerful placebo. After all, neither patient nor surgeon would dare to run the risk of complications if they are not convinced that the operation will be a success. And, of course, surgery is quite a lot more dramatic than a pill or a drink. The placebo effect is weaker among patients who derive considerable satisfaction from their bad health, for example people who thrive on the sympathy and attention they receive because of it. Conversely, the effect can be reinforced among patients who would benefit more than average from a successful treatment.

The Charisma Myth: How Anyone Can Master the Art and Science of Personal Magnetism
by Olivia Fox Cabane
Published 1 Mar 2012

Just by getting into a charismatic mental state, your body will manifest a charismatic body language. In medicine, the mind’s powerfully positive effect on the body is known as the placebo effect. A placebo is a simulated medical procedure: patients given “pretend” pills are told they’re receiving real ones; or people are told they’ve received a medical intervention when in fact nothing has been done. In a surprising number of cases, patients given these inert treatments still experience a real improvement in their medical condition. The placebo effect was discovered during World War I when medicine stores had run out and doctors found they could sometimes still ease their patients’ suffering by telling them that they had administered pain-relieving treatments.

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Yet people’s conditions still often improved, thanks to the mind’s impressive ability to affect the body. The placebo effect can sometimes be remarkably powerful. Ellen Langer, a Harvard University professor of psychology, gathered a group of elderly patients in a nursing-home-like environment and surrounded them with the decor, clothing, food, and music that was popular when they were in their twenties. In the following weeks, physical exams showed tighter skin, better eyesight, increased muscle strength, and even higher bone density than before. The placebo effect is the basis for many of the best charisma-enhancing techniques, and we’ll refer to it often throughout the book.

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Instead, it helps you to be less affected by it, drawing you out of the negative mental and physical states that often accompany a position of not knowing. The outcome of your situation may still be uncertain, but you’re no longer so anxious about it. By presenting your mind with the possibility that responsibility has been transferred, you’re putting to good use the wonderful placebo effect—the brain’s inability to distinguish between imagination and reality. As we’ll see in later chapters, the placebo effect works even when we know we’re self-deceiving, perhaps thanks to this natural cognitive delay in disbelief.5 One of my clients used this technique just before stepping on stage to give a key presentation. It had the potential to be a turning point in his career, and he’d been feeling tense for a week.

The Secret of Our Success: How Culture Is Driving Human Evolution, Domesticating Our Species, and Making Us Smarter
by Joseph Henrich
Published 27 Oct 2015

The more you believe it will work, the more it may actually work. Not only that, there appears to be a synergistic interaction between the size of the placebo effects and the size of the chemical effects; that is, the more one believes a drug like morphine will reduce pain (measured by using placebomorphine), the more effective real morphine actually is. Some drugs don’t work at all if administered without the patient’s conscious knowledge—that is, the drug requires some placebo effect to catalyze the chemical effects.18 Culture enters powerfully here because our beliefs and expectations are either set by our own direct experience (what placebo researchers call “conditioning”) or by cultural learning.

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Current Biology 20 (12):R507–R508. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2010.04.021. Mithun, M. 1984. “How to avoid subordination.” Berkeley Linguistics Society 10:493–523. Moerman, D. 2002. “Explanatory mechanisms for placebo effects: Cultural influences and the meaning response.” In The Science of the Placebo: Toward an Interdisciplinary Research Agenda, edited by H. A. Guess, A. Kleinman, J. W. Kusek, and L. W. Engel, 77–107. London: BMJ Books. ———. 2000. “Cultural variations in the placebo effect: Ulcers, anxiety, and blood pressure.” Medical Anthropology Quarterly 14 (1):51–72. Mokyr, J. 1990. The Lever of Riches. New York: Oxford University Press. Moll, J., F.

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Cultural learning could set the beliefs we bring into the doctor’s office, or they could be set by the doctor herself after we enter. Moreover, culture can set up a feedback loop. Suppose we first acquire expectations from our social milieu that a medical treatment is very effective. Then we are treated and get better, in part due to the placebo effect created by those initial expectations. The next time, we bring in both the conditioning from the last treatment (our direct experience of getting better) and again our culturally acquired expectations. This kind of feedback could create either virtuous or vicious cycles, making people more or less likely to get better after a treatment.

Singularity Rising: Surviving and Thriving in a Smarter, Richer, and More Dangerous World
by James D. Miller
Published 14 Jun 2012

When the subjects are being evaluated, neither they nor their evaluators know if they have taken the real drug or the placebo. Unfortunately, however, these tests suffer from two serious biases. First, these tests don’t fully take into account the placebo effect which occurs when you get better all by yourself simply because you think the medicine you took is supposed to make you better. For example, when my young son bumped his head, I took advantage of the placebo effect by telling him that the Vaseline I put on his head would make him feel better. I even told him that I didn’t want to put too much of the medicine on him because it was “extremely powerful,” and I didn’t think he could handle it.

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My son claimed that the medicine made him feel better. The placebo effect is a widespread and mysterious phenomenon, and there’s a reasonable chance that it also works for cognitive-enhancement drugs. This means that if you give someone a real drug, part of the benefit arises just because they think they’ve consumed a real drug; and if you give someone a sham drug that they think is real, their cognitive performance will improve anyway. Double-blind tests understate the efficacy of cognitive enhancement drugs to the extent that the placebo effect holds. For example, assume that: A. If you took a drug and were truthfully told it was a real drug, your performance would improve by 15 percent.

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This 15 percent improvement comes from both the inherent medical value of the pill and the placebo effect. B. If you took a real drug and were told that there was a 50 percent chance that it was real (as is the case when you participate in a double-blind drug trial), then you would experience a 10 percent performance improvement.265 C. If you took a sugar pill and were told that there was a 50 percent chance that it was real, then you would experience a 4 percent performance improvement, all of it coming from the placebo effect. A double-blind test would compare the performance improvements in (B) and (C) and claim that the drug yielded a 6 percent improvement.

What Patients Say, What Doctors Hear
by Danielle Ofri
Published 1 Feb 2017

It’s no great secret, of course. Wise physicians and experienced nurses (not to mention astute patients) have also keyed into this, even if only subconsciously. Nevertheless, it’s intriguing to see this effect borne out in controlled scientific studies. These studies bring me to the whole idea of placebo. The placebo effect, as most people know, is a change in someone’s health from a treatment that contains no active medical substance. The effect is well known, which is why every clinical trial worth its salt is placebo-controlled. The treatment under investigation must be compared with a placebo, not to “doing nothing,” because the placebo group always registers an effect.

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Before we had treatments that could actually impact the pathology of disease—antibiotics, chemotherapy, stents, organ transplants, transfusions—the “everything else” was the mainstay of medical care, and in many cases it was remarkably effective. But in the twentieth century, now that there were actual medical treatments, placebos were considered psychological mumbo jumbo, more akin to hypnotism than real medicine. The biological breakthrough came in 1978, when researchers showed that not only was the placebo effect real, but that it could be reversed by administering naloxone—a chemical that blocks our endorphins.5 Endorphins are intriguing neurochemicals that act as our homegrown painkillers. The term, in fact, was coined by my PhD adviser Eric Simon as a contraction of “endogenous morphine” because that’s how these neurochemicals behaved, just like morphine.6 (I spent several wonderful years escaping med school in Eric’s lab, as we researched the biochemistry of the receptors for these endorphins.)

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This “open-label” placebo is a direct contrast to standard clinical trials in which participants don’t know if they are getting the active medication or the placebo. The blinding in clinical trials is deliberate because, presumably, if you knew you were getting the blank pills you wouldn’t experience any placebo effect and the true effect of the test medication couldn’t be accurately teased out. In Kaptchuk’s study, however, the patients knowingly took the placebo. There was no effort to dress it up with the chance that they might be receiving an active medication. Yet after three weeks these patients who openly took an inert pill experienced a decrease in their symptoms and an increase in their quality-of-life ratings.

Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain
by António R. Damásio
Published 1 Jan 1994

Medicine has been slow to realize that how people feel about their medical condition is a major factor in the outcome of treatment. We still know very little about the placebo effect, through which patients respond beneficially in excess of what a given medical intervention would lead one to expect. (The placebo effect can be assessed by investigating the effect of tablets or injections which, unbeknownst to the patient, contain no active pharmacological ingredient and are thus presumed to have no influence whatever, positive or negative.) For instance, we do not know who is more likely to respond with a placebo effect, or if all of us can. We also do not know how far the placebo effect can go and how close to the effect of the real thing it can get.

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We also do not know how far the placebo effect can go and how close to the effect of the real thing it can get. We know little about how to enhance the placebo effect. And we have no idea about the degree of error the placebo effect has created for so-called double-blind studies. The fact that psychological disturbances, mild or strong, can cause diseases of the body proper is finally beginning to be accepted, but the circumstances in which they can, and the degree to which they can, remain unstudied. Of course our grandmothers knew all about this: they could tell us how grief, obsessive worry, excessive anger, and so forth would damage hearts, give ulcers, destroy complexions, and make one more prone to infections.

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E., 70, 133, 274, 283 Passions of the Soul (Descartes), 124 Patient A case, 54–56 Pauker, S. G., 272 Penfield, Wilder, 56, 134, 273 Peptides, feelings and, 144-45, 160 Pericman, E., 284 Peripheral nervous system, 26 Pert, C. B., 281 Petersen, S. E., 72, 275, 277, 288 Petrides, Michael, 182, 287 Phrenology, 14–17 Placebo effect, 256 Plum, Fred, 238, 275, 277, 286 Poggio, T. A., 277 Poincaréé, Henri, 188–89, 287 Positron emission tomography (PET), 101 Posner, Jerome, 238 Posner, M. I., 72, 275, 277, 288 Powell, T. P. S., 92, 276 Powers, P. S., 285 Prefrontal leucotomy, 58–60 Preorganized mechanisms, 117 Pribram, K.

The Irrational Bundle
by Dan Ariely
Published 3 Apr 2013

Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely, “Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay For,” Journal of Marketing Research (2005). Rebecca Waber, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely, “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” JAMA (2008). RELATED READINGS Tor Wager, James Rilling, Edward Smith, Alex Sokolik, Kenneth Casey, Richard Davidson, Stephen Kosslyn, Robert Rose, and Jonathan Cohen, “Placebo-Induced Changes in fMRI in the Anticipation and Experience of Pain,” Science (2004). Alia Crum and Ellen Langer, “Mind-Set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect,” Psychological Science (2007).

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*The music included Bach’s “Chaconne,” Franz Schubert’s “Ave Maria,” Manuel Ponce’s “Estrellita,” a piece by Jules Massenet, a Bach gavotte, and a reprise of “Chaconne.” *We do understand quite precisely how a placebo works in the domain of pain, and this is why we selected the painkiller as our object of investigation. But other placebo effects are not as well understood. **I suspect that Airborne incorporates many elements to maximize the placebo effect (bubbles, foaming, medicinal color, exaggerated claims, and so on) and, as a consequence, had a real beneficial impact on my immune system and my ability to fight off illnesses. Placebos are all about self-fulfilling prophecies, and Airborne is one of the best.

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When the study appeared on July 11, 2002, as the lead article in the New England Journal of Medicine, some doctors screamed foul and questioned the method and results of the study. In response, Dr. Moseley argued that his study had been carefully designed and carried out. “Surgeons . . . who routinely perform arthroscopy are undoubtedly embarrassed at the prospect that the placebo effect—not surgical skill—is responsible for patient improvement after the surgeries they perform. As you might imagine, these surgeons are going to great lengths to try to discredit our study.” Regardless of the extent to which you believe the results of this study, it is clear that we should be more suspicious about arthroscopic surgery for this particular condition, and at the same time increase the burden of proof for medical procedures in general.

Endure: Mind, Body, and the Curiously Elastic Limits of Human Performance
by Alex Hutchinson
Published 6 Feb 2018

Broatch et al., “Postexercise Cold Water Immersion Benefits Are Not Greater than the Placebo Effect,” Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise 46, no. 11 (2014). 7. paradigm-altering demonstration: J. D. Levine et al., “The Mechanism of Placebo Analgesia,” Lancet 2, no. 8091 (1978). 8. placebo-driven expectations: Sumathi Reddy, “Why Placebos Really Work: The Latest Science,” Wall Street Journal, July 18, 2016. 9. treat irritable bowel syndrome: Kathryn Hall et al., “Catechol-O-Methyltransferase val158met Polymorphism Predicts Placebo Effect in Irritable Bowel Syndrome,” PLoS One 7, no. 10 (2012). 10. cyclists rode 1.3 percent faster: C.

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If your body can store enough carbohydrate for 90 minutes or more of exercise, why do some studies find subtle performance boosts from sports drinks in exercise bouts lasting as little as half an hour?28 And moreover, why do those boosts kick in pretty much instantaneously, long before the carbohydrates have even left your stomach? The easy answer is that the benefits are all in your head—that it’s a placebo effect. But that’s only partially correct. A series of studies by Asker Jeukendrup, the sports nutrition researcher who led the development of glucose-fructose mixtures, found that glucose-based sports drink boosted performance in a one-hour cycling time trial. But when, instead of drinking a glucose drink, the cyclists had glucose infused directly into their bloodstream—which should have been more effective—the benefits disappeared.

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So, in 2004, Jeukendrup and his colleagues tried a different approach: this time they asked the cyclists to swish the sports drink in their mouths and then spit it out without swallowing. It worked: simply having sports drink in your mouth seemed to be more important than getting it into your bloodstream and to your muscles.29 It’s important to note that these studies were placebo-controlled: the drinks all tasted the same. Still, it’s hard to shake the feeling that a placebo effect must have crept in, and many scientists remained skeptical of the findings. It wasn’t until 2009 that researchers at the University of Birmingham settled the debate, with a study that confirmed the performance benefits of swishing and spitting a carbohydrate drink—and used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that brain areas associated with reward were lighting up as soon as the subjects had carbohydrate in their mouth.30 Crucially, neither the brain scan nor cycling performance showed any effects when the drink was artificially sweetened, but the benefits returned when maltodextrine, a tasteless and undetectable carbohydrate, was added to the artificially sweetened drink.

The Other Side of Happiness: Embracing a More Fearless Approach to Living
by Brock Bastian
Published 25 Jan 2018

Researchers were then able to show that these effects were due to the increased activation of neurotransmitters that commonly help people cope with pain (opioids and cannabinoids). Simply changing the purpose of pain led the brain to alter how it processed the message of pain. A particularly poignant illustration of just how much our experience of pain is based on our expectations comes from work on the placebo effect. Placebos are used in clinical trials when testing the effectiveness of a new drug. Patients will be split into two groups, with one group receiving the actual drug and the other receiving a sugar pill. These trials are generally called ‘double-blind trials’ as both the patients and researchers do not know which group is the placebo group and which is the experimental group until the end of the study, thereby reducing the possibility of bias.

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Researchers in these trials began to notice that patients in the placebo groups would often show significant improvement in their symptoms. Of course, this was inconvenient for the researchers as it meant that for any new drug to be deemed ‘effective’ it needed to outperform the beneficial effects of the placebo. In order to better understand the placebo effect, researchers have begun to study it on its own terms. In one study, researchers from Oxford University administered a potent opioid analgesic (remifentanil) to volunteers while they were exposed to thermal pain (heat).14 This took place in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner so the researchers could examine neural responses while the volunteers rated the intensity of the pain and their feelings of anxiety with regard to it.

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Drugs are rolled out on to the market once they have been tested and shown to be effective but not harmful. This means they have been demonstrated to be more effective than a control baseline condition where people expected the benefits of a drug but receive a placebo instead (usually saline solution or a sugar tablet). Yet, it is important to note that this placebo effect is equal across both conditions. Whether people are taking the actual drug or a fake drug, they are still experiencing the psychological effect of pill taking, and this makes them feel better independently of any actual pharmacological effects. This means that when we pop a Panadol or an aspirin we are not only getting the benefits of the medication, we are also getting the psychological benefit of the expectation that taking the pill will make our pain better.

The Genius Within: Unlocking Your Brain's Potential
by David Adam
Published 6 Feb 2018

The music (Christmas songs on strict rotation), other people and the kids running around were less of a distraction. I was thinking these sentences as fast as I could tap them out. I came to this coffee shop because they offered free refills. But after thirty minutes my first cup lay pushed to one side, barely sipped and cold. Was I making this sensation up, imagining it? Was this just a placebo effect, the power of suggestion? Did it even matter? I had taken a drug supposed to sharpen my senses and release my cognition, and my senses felt sharp and my cognition free. I felt like I wanted to keep typing. So I did. I could FOCUS and I felt MOTIVATED. In previous days two hours of book writing was about enough for one sitting.

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I would kid myself I was still making progress beyond that, but my attention would wander and the writing slow. That wasn’t happening that day. Several hours in and I was still alert. The screen seemed bigger and more welcoming. I felt like I was leaning in, the words as they presented themselves seemed to be close and moving smoothly and quickly. This was terrific. If it was a placebo effect then bring it on. If pilots fly helicopters and fighter aircraft on these drugs then I’m not sure if that’s a good idea. Alongside the welcome sharpening of my senses I felt impulsive and my fingers were twitching when they weren’t striking the keys. I stroked my unshaven chin a lot. I didn’t think I would like to drive.

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‘6:3’. What? ‘The score. It’s 6:3 to me,’ said Mike as he served. I tried a clever return, playing it off the side wall to die in the front corner. Risky but he would never expect it. The ball hit the line. Out. ‘7:3’. Whatever I had, the mental boost of a banned stimulant, the confidence of the placebo effect or just the increased concentration from thinking so much about the mental side of the game, it had gone. The bad old me returned to court. The TCUP well and truly dropped. Mike won the next three games and the match. He won and I lost 3:2 in a thriller, so I suppose we both got what we wanted.

How to Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence-Based Medicine
by Trisha Greenhalgh
Published 18 Nov 2010

Clinical epidemiology: a basic science for clinical medicine. Boston, USA: Little, Brown and Company, 1985. 9 Goldacre B. Bad pharma: how drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients. London, Fourth Estate: Random House Digital Inc., 2013. 10 Rajagopal S. The placebo effect. Psychiatric Bulletin 2006;30(5):185–8. 11 Price DD, Finniss DG, Benedetti F. A comprehensive review of the placebo effect: recent advances and current thought. Annual Review of Psychology 2008;59:565–90. 12 Gøtzsche PC, Liberati A, Torri V, et al. Beware of surrogate outcome measures. International Journal of Technology Assessment in Health Care 1996;12(02):238–46. 13 Connolly SJ.

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Doctors have spent time in libraries since libraries were invented. In general, we don't put a patient on a new drug without evidence that it is likely to work. Apart from anything else, such off-licence use of medication is, strictly speaking, illegal. Surely we have all been practising EBM for years, except when we were deliberately bluffing (using the ‘placebo’ effect for good medical reasons), or when we were ill, overstressed or consciously being lazy? Well, no, we haven't. There have been a number of surveys on the behaviour of doctors, nurses and related professionals. It was estimated in the 1970s in the USA that only around 10–20% of all health technologies then available (i.e. drugs, procedures, operations, etc.) were evidence-based; that figure improved to 21% in 1990, according to official US statistics [4].

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Pharmaceutical reps do not tell nearly as many lies as they used to (drug marketing has become an altogether more sophisticated science), but as Goldacre [9] has shown in his book ‘Bad Pharma’, they still provide information that is at best selective and at worst overtly biased. It often helps their case, for example, to present the results of uncontrolled trials and express them in terms of before-and-after differences in a particular outcome measure. Reference to section ‘Cross-sectional surveys’ and the literature on placebo effects [10] [11] should remind you why uncontrolled before-and-after studies are the stuff of teenage magazines, not hard science. Dr Herxheimer, who edited the Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin for many years, undertook a survey of ‘references’ cited in advertisements for pharmaceutical products in the leading UK medical journals.

The Book of Woe: The DSM and the Unmaking of Psychiatry
by Gary Greenberg
Published 1 May 2013

Even before we ask for remedy, this is what we ask of our doctors: to lay bare the beginnings of our suffering, to elicit our present crisis, to tell us what is going to happen in the end. Without that story, we might not take their pills, and—since so much of our response to medication is the result of placebo effects, and placebo effects in turn depend on the patient’s belief in his or her doctor—the pills might not work. On the other hand, most of us won’t accept just any tale about our woes. We want our doctors’ stories about us to be based in fact, not opinion. We want them to make sense, which, if they start telling us that grieving the loss of a parent is an illness, they don’t.

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He lived before autonomy and equality were expectations for a good life, before universal justice was the hallmark of a good society, and before a couple thousand years of history had revealed what can happen when people with power—even virtuous people—act in the supposed interests of those with none. Not that Frances’s concern about the effect of diagnostic squabbling on patients was less than beneficent or only about maintaining psychiatry’s dominion over our inner lives. “Like most medical specialties4, our field depends heavily on placebo effects,” he pointed out. And pills aren’t the only way to deliver the placebo effect. Even if “the diagnostic label is just a description, and not really an explanation for what has gone wrong,” Frances says, still it is crucial to treatment. Delivering a diagnosis gives us solace: that we are not making it up, that the doctor understands, that there are others like us, that there is hope for a cure.

…

Indeed, he has always insisted he doesn’t care about his own image, and while that may be a little too much protest, it’s not hard to believe that his worries are genuine, and that my real betrayal is using his comment to harm the people who need to have confidence in their doctors (and keep taking their drugs) to get better. If the discrepancy between opportunity and knowledge remains under wraps, it seems, that’s not bullshit. That’s wisely deploying the placebo effect. That’s medicine. The camera is rolling, or whatever it is that digital cameras do. I’m pinned and wriggling, scrambling for some way to explain why I don’t seem to care about what happens when people glimpse what’s behind the curtain. It isn’t the first time a psychiatrist has warned me that criticizing the profession would lead to dire consequences.

Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard
by Chip Heath and Dan Heath
Published 10 Feb 2010

The researchers Crum and Langer chalked up the maids’ weight loss to a placebo effect. In other words, they concluded that awareness of the exercise value of their activities triggered the weight loss, independent of any physical changes in the maids’ behavior. The placebo effect is one of the most reliable phenomena in modern medicine, so at first glance, this explanation seems reasonable. We’ve all got friends who swear by the healing powers of questionable remedies—stinkweed supplements or goat horn extract. Maybe the maids got a similar mental boost from their new knowledge. But notice what placebo-effect situations have in common: They apply to conditions that are self-reported.

…

So it’s understandable (though still fundamentally weird) that the patients who get placebos, rather than Advil or Prozac, might report feeling a bit better. But this isn’t one of those situations. No one was asking these maids how they felt or whether they perceived themselves to be healthier. The maids simply stepped onto a scale, and the scale reported a lower weight. Scales aren’t subject to placebo effects. OK, but if you’ve suddenly discovered that you’re a good exerciser, might not that trigger some kind of mind-body effect? Couldn’t it kick your metabolism into overdrive or something? It’s not impossible, we suppose, but let’s be honest: If the power of thinking could indeed make you skinnier, that would be a scientific revelation on par with cold fusion (as well as a billion-dollar self-help book—Think Yourself Thin).

…

Positive emotion also makes it easier for people to make connections among dissimilar ideas, and it makes them less likely to slip into an “us versus them” mentality. All of these tendencies—flexible problem solving, innovative solutions, less political infighting—would be very useful in a change situation. Chapter Six A study of hotel maids. See Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer (2007), “MindSet Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect,” Psychological Science, 18, 165–171. Car-wash loyalty cards. See J. C. Nunes and X. Dreze (2006), “The Endowed Progress Effect: How Artificial Advancement Increases Effort,” Journal of Consumer Research, 32, 504–512. 50 percent of the money in the bag. This practice was discussed in an interview between Chip Heath and Jan Alfieri, of the Association of Fundraising Professionals, in February 2009.

The Choice Factory: 25 Behavioural Biases That Influence What We Buy
by Richard Shotton
Published 12 Feb 2018

I’ve spent the last 12 years testing existing biases to determine how they can best be used by brands. It’s the findings of these tests that I’d like to take you through in this book. A competitive advantage Despite the relevance and robustness of behavioural science, the results are erratically applied in marketing. Consider the placebo effect. This is the finding that if patients expect a drug to work, it’s more likely that it will, even if the medicine has no active ingredients. One of the most interesting facets of placebos is that small, seemingly incidental, details such as the pill’s price, size, taste, even the colour can dramatically boost the size of the effect.

…

This is due to the cultural connotations of each colour; while red suggests strength and power, blue evokes calming images of the sky and sea. For a painkiller strength is more important than calmness. Analgesics are a high-value market. According to Euromonitor, £614m was spent on analgesics in the UK in 2016. However, many painkillers fail to fully capitalise on the placebo effect. Of the seven packs of painkillers I purchased on a string of visits to Boots, a measly one was red. What a waste. Why do so many brands ignore the opportunity, when a small design twist could improve performance? Part of the reason behavioural science findings are sometimes ignored is that advertisers often ask consumers directly about their motivations.

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Index 118 118 ad campaigns ad design ad messaging advertising advertising expenditure Alter, Adam anchoring Anderson, Eric Apple iPod Ariely, Dan Aristotle Arkes, Hal Aronson, Elliot Asch, Solomon auctions Audi Avis Banks, Iain banner ads Batey, Ifan Batson, Daniel behaviour contexts Behavioural Insight Team behavioural science Bernbach, Bill biases Binet, Les Black Sheep Vodka Borges, Jorge Louis brand flaws brand ideals brand measurement brand purpose brand reviews brand tracking brands Brink, Lois British Airways ads broken escalator phenomenon Bronner, Fred Brooks, Roy Brown, Millward brownies example browser choice Bruner, Jerome budget airlines budget setting see advertising expenditure Bullmore, Jeremy business growth business success Busse, Meghan bystander effect camera experiment Camerer, Colin Campbell’s soup experiment canned laughter Cantril, Hadley car deals examples card payments category norms CBS Outdoor and TNS cell methodology charity campaigns charm pricing Cherry, Colin Christiaensen, Luc Cialdini, Robert Cimbalo, Richard cinema ads claimed data Clay, Richard cocktail party effect cognitive illusions coin exaggeration Comparethemarket comparison sets confirmation bias Confused consumer overconfidence consumers habits contactless cards contexts behaviour media target cookies example Copernicus Consulting copywriting Corrigan, Spencer Costa coffee credit cards customer reviews Darley, John De Beers diamonds de Crane, Anton Deaux, Kay Deppe, Michael descriptive norms diamonds see De Beers diamonds diary-based experiment digital ads digital brand tracking direct mail discounts distinctiveness distraction dress sales experiment Dunning, David Dzamic, Lazar Ebbinghaus, Herman Eno, Brian estate agents ethics evaluation expectancy theory explicit messages fake beer experiment fake brands Fanelli, Daniele Ferguson, Alex Festinger, Leon Field, Peter first impressions football sponsorships Ford found data fundamental attribution error general election, UK Genovese, Kitty Genovese syndrome see bystander effect Gilbert, Dan Give Blood campaign, NHS gluten-free products Gocompare Goldstein, Noah good mood Goodhart’s Law Goodman, Cecile Gossett, William Sealy green goods Griffiths, Dylan Griskevicus, Vladas groups Guinness Gumroad habits Haidt, Jonathan Halifax Halpern, David Harford, Tim Hastorf, Albert heavy buyers Hegarty, John Hershfield, Hal Hobday, Gabrielle Hoffman, Bob Housman, Michael injunctive norm IPA Effectiveness Databank isolation effect JC Decaux Jenkins, Jeff Jones, John Joyner, Cynthia Jung, Carl Kahneman, Daniel Kandasamy, Anna Kay, John King Cobra beer knowledge Kruger, Justin labelling lager choice example Larrey, Dominique Jean Latané, Bibb leading brands Leahy, Terry Levenson, Bob lies life events Linford, Claire localisation loss aversion Lumen Research Maccoby, Nathan Maclean, Laura Magners cider male incontinence brand Manchester United Many Labs Replication Project market leaders marketing marketing managers marketing triage Martin, Steve maximisers McDonald’s media contexts medical practice method planning mimicry Mirenberg, Matthew Moneysupermarket mood Moseley, Winston motivation music musicians National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyle (NATSAL) Neale, Margaret negative opinions negative social proof Nespresso new energy provider example New Look campaign newspaper ads Newton, Elizabeth NHS Give Blood campaign nine-enders Nokia nominative determinism Northcraft, Gregory Nosek, Brian nudges Nurse Family Partnership observed behaviour observed data Ocado O’Callaghan, Aidan online advertising overconfidence painkillers payment methods contactless cards credit cards Pelham, Brett perfume experiment Perry, Katy personal appeal personalisation persuasion petrified wood experiment placebo effect Polkinghorne, Vic popularity pratfall effect Prelec, Drazen pre-paid gift cards presentation Prezzo, Mark price price illusions price relativity primacy effect principal-agent problem product flaws programmatic advertising promotions Quinn, Jeffrey Raghubir, Priya recall Red Bull rejecters replicability Restorff, Hedwig von Riddell, Jenny Rosenzweig, Phil Ross, Lee Ross, Stephen Rosser Reeves fallacy Rudder, Christian Sainsbury’s satisficers scarcity serial position effect sexism sexual partners Shapiro, Matthew Sharp, Byron Sherif, Muzafer Shiv, Baba Shotton, Richard ad design Black Sheep Vodka brand purpose charity campaigns contactless cards fake beer experiment general election good mood green goods lager choice leading brands life events loss aversion male incontinence brand New Look campaign nine-enders overconfidence perfume experiment product flaws scarcity spending patterns sponsorships thought experiment value perception shower gel example Shteynberg, Garriy Simester, Duncan Simon, Herbert Simonsohn, Uri Simonson, Itamar Slovic, Paul Snickers chocolate bars social media social proof negative spending patterns sponsorships Srivastava, Joydeep Stella Artois Stengel, Jim Stengel Stephens-Davidowitz, Seth Street Bump app, Boston Strong, Rebecca supermarkets surveys Sutherland, Rory Svenson, Ola switched brands tailored approach target audiences target contexts target setting targeting ads tax payments Tesco Thaler, Richard The Wasp Factory (Banks, 1984) thought experiment time frames Total Recall Touchpoints towel experiment tracking data transparency Trott, Dave TV ads Tversky, Amos unintended consequences Vallance, Charles value perception video-conferencing Vietnam visual illusions vitamins example Von Restorff effect VW ad campaign Wansink, Brian waste websites Weston, Laura wheel of fortune example Whiskas Wikipedia Wilcox, Keith winner’s curse wishful seeing Wood, Wendy Worchel, Stephen Yahoo younger age groups Zettelmayer, Florian Zhang, Yong Zinkan, George

100 Plus: How the Coming Age of Longevity Will Change Everything, From Careers and Relationships to Family And
by Sonia Arrison
Published 22 Aug 2011

In 1920, Serge Voronoff, a Russian doctor based in Paris, started transplanting parts of chimps in an effort to restore youth to men under the theory that the sex glands drove energy.58 We have seen that the linking of sex and youth is not a new idea, but the use of animal transplants in this way was fairly novel. Many of Dr. Voronoff’s patients died, but those who didn’t thought they actually saw results (most likely a placebo effect). And he wasn’t the only one wedded to this theory. In America, doctors in prisons were experimenting with similar techniques. Eventually, some well-known people underwent similar procedures, including former middleweight champion boxer Frank Klaus and Irish poet William Butler Yeats.59 Indeed, Yeats felt the placebo effect so strongly that the sixty-nine-year-old entered into an affair with a twenty-seven-year-old actress.60 We now know that grafting animal tissue onto humans is useless because the body rejects it, but we have also learned a lot more about the endocrine system and the impact that hormones have on our bodies.

…

Carnes in their book The Quest for Immortality, “is that by reasserting control over the mind, the supernatural power taken by God could be restored.” 11 This idea of mind over matter was, and still is, shared by many as powerful medicine and certainly isn’t limited to the religious sphere. The very fact of a placebo effect, in which people’s symptoms subside simply because they think they are taking a drug when they are instead taking a sugar pill (the placebo), is a reminder of how powerful the mind can be. Such power led Irish writer George Bernard Shaw to advocate for the Lamarckian idea that characteristics could be acquired and passed down through generations.

…

Thomas Perrott, Kevin Perry, Daniel “Personalized Life Extension Conference: Anti-Aging Strategies for a Long Healthy Life” (conference) Personalized medicine Peterson, Christine Peterson, Dr. Michael Pew Forum on Religious and Public Life Pew Research Center Social and Demographic Trends survey on aging Phoenix, Chris Picture of Dorian Gray, The (Wilde) Pink Army Cooperative Pinochet, Augusto Placebo effect Plec, Julie Pluralism, religious Political issues Pollution Ponce de León, Juan Pons, Stanley Popenoe, David Population Bomb, The (Ehrlich) Population growth (fig.) and innovative ideas Population Growth and Economic Development (National Academy of Sciences) Posner, Richard Poverty Precautionary principle President’s Council on Bioethics Preston, Samuel Prey (Crichton) Prices Productivity Prometheus Property and Environment Research Center Property rights(fig.)

The Age of the Infovore: Succeeding in the Information Economy
by Tyler Cowen
Published 25 May 2010

The more expensive wine really can taste better, simply because it is more expensive, and we want to keep that as one of our pleasures in life. It’s what helps to make “special occasions” feel so special, namely that we went to considerable trouble to do something. In part our expectations make the difference a real one through a kind of placebo effect. But if we have chosen that placebo effect, such a “trick” can bring real human benefits. Dan Ariely did a famous study where he showed that more expensive pain relief medication, even of similar quality, does a better job at alleviating pain. Or maybe I love my wife more because I had to court her with great passion.

…

There are plenty of studies that measure the economic “rate of return” on education and these studies come up with fairly high numbers. In other words, if you graduate from college, or with a postgraduate degree, you will earn more. But what are these studies comparing education to? It’s now well-known in the medical literature that a medicine needs to be compared to a placebo, rather than to simply doing nothing. Placebo effects can be very powerful and many supposedly effective medicines do not in fact outperform the placebo. The sorry truth is that no one has compared modern education to a placebo. What if we just gave people lots of face-to-face contact and told them they were being educated? I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that question.

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See ordering of information metaphysics, 203–5 Michelangelo, 166 micro-blogging services, 74–78 Microsoft Network (MSN), 47 Midnight Economist, 49 migrants, 106 “The Mind as a Consuming Organ” (Schelling), 117–19, 138–39 mindfulness, 95, 100 minorities, 212 mobility, 216–17 monotonizing existence, 141–42 Monty Python’s Holy Grail, 137 morality, 206 Moriarty, James (fictional character), 153 Mormons, 107 mosttraveledpeople.com, 105 movies, 114, 134 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 57–58, 166 multitasking, 51–53, 56–57 music access to, 43 and amusia, 179–80 atonal music, 182–86, 187, 188 and autistics, 18, 26, 180–81, 187–91 duration of, 42, 44 live music, 114 music industry, 4–6 order in, 186 pitch perception, 18, 180 and self-assembled bits of culture, 57–58 serialist music, 188 and social validation, 84 subscription services, 6 Musicophilia (Sacks), 179 MyLifeBits, 97–98 My Mile Marker, 12 MySpace, 46 Napkin Fiction, 44 Napster, 6 narrative psychology, 126 National Association of Blind Lawyers, 25 nationalism, 197–99 Nausea (Sartre), 142 Nazeer, Kamran, 12 nerds, 22–23, 110–11 neurodiversity and aesthetic values, 189 and atonal music, 182, 184, 185 historical figures with, 166–67 importance of, 125 and politics, 198 relation to autism, 22 and respect for the individual, 223 and support groups, 23–24 understanding of, 211 See also autism and autistic individuals neurodiversity.com, 35 neuroeconomics, 125, 202 neurology and aesthetic values, 174, 175–79, 184–92 and Dalai Lama, 95–96 and Kant, 205 and politics, 201 and respect for the individual, 222 neuroplasticity, 96 New Age religions, 101–2 Newmark, Craig, 24 Newton, Isaac, 25, 166 The New Yorker, 44 The New York Review of Books, 44 The New York Times, 34, 56, 104 New Zealand, 207 Nordic counties, 207 Nordon, Pierre, 160 novelty, 141–42 Nozick, Robert, 142–45 Nudge (Thaler and Sunstein), 124 Obama, Barack, 87 objectivity of autistics, 194–95 obsession, 103 Odadeo, 9 Oe, Hikari, 181–82 Oe, Kenzaburo, 181 “Of the Standard of Taste” (Hume), 177 optical illusions, 18 ordering of information, 2–14 and autistics, 2–3, 10–14, 20, 24, 36, 57, 140–41, 213 and Buddhism, 91, 92, 94, 96, 99–100, 105 collecting as form of, 102 and education, 111 in fictional characters, 148–49 and importance of the medium, 67 and information overload, 55 and Kant, 203–6 and multitasking, 56–57 and music, 186 and recording daily life, 96–98 in social networking contexts, 6–9 and stories, 126–29, 140–41 and web, 4–9, 10–12, 13 Orwell, George, 166 Ostwald, Peter, 167 otaku culture, 218–19 Overcoming Bias website, 193–94 Page, Tim, 180–81 pain relief medication, 81 pain tolerance, 19 Paradiso (Dante), 128 parents of autistic children, 36 patience, 53, 54 patriotism, 197 pattern recognition, 18, 150, 189, 201 PDF documents, 71 peers, 87 perception and aesthetic values, 177 effect on human behavior of, 121–23 perceptual abilities of autistics, 36, 148–49, 176, 189 perseverations, 31, 169 Pessoa, Fernando, 120, 141–42 phone, talking on, 31 photographs, 11 Pierrot Lunaire (Schoenberg), 183 pitch perception, 18, 180 placebo effect, 80–81, 115 Poe, Edgar Allan, 160 political connections, 87–88 politics, 193–209 and abstract reasoning, 199–203 and cosmopolitanism, 196–99, 201, 203 and endowment effect, 195–96, 199 and human cognition, 193 and objectivity, 194–95 and ordering, 203–6 and rule-governed behavior, 206–9 postmodernism, 45 Pownce, 74 Predictably Irrational (Ariely), 124 The Princess Bride, 127 print media, 43–44, 66, 201 production, 9 propaganda, 140 prosopagnosia, 25, 132 prosperity, 1, 228 psychology, 124 Psychology Today, 174–75 quests, 126–28 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 166 Rae, John, 168 Raffman, Diana, 185 Rain Man (film), 15 Rangaswami, J.

The Inevitable: Understanding the 12 Technological Forces That Will Shape Our Future
by Kevin Kelly
Published 6 Jun 2016

We know from many classic large population studies that often the medicine we take works because we believe it will work. This is otherwise known as the placebo effect. These quantified-self tricks don’t fully counter the placebo effect; rather they work with it. If the intervention is producing a measurable improvement in you, then it works. Whether this measurable improvement is caused by the placebo effect doesn’t matter since we only care what effect it has on this N=1 subject. Thus a placebo effect can be positive. In formal studies, you need a control group to offset your bias toward positive results. So in lieu of a control group in an N=1 study, a quantified-self experimenter uses his or her own baseline.

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See also work environments on-demand expectations, 64–65, 114–17 OpenOffice, 151 open source industry, 135, 141–42, 143, 271 oral communication, 204 Oscar Awards, 187–88 overfitting, 170 ownership, 112–13, 117–18, 121–22, 124–25, 127, 138 Page, Larry, 36–37 Pandora, 169 parallel computation, 38–39, 40 passive archives, 249 passwords, 220, 235 patents, 283 PatientsLikeMe, 145 patronage, 71–72 PayPal, 65, 119–20, 124 pedometers, 238 peer-to-peer networks, 129–30, 184–85 Periscope, 76 “personal analytics” engine, 239 personalization, 68–69, 172–73, 175, 191, 240–41, 261–62 pharmaceutical research, 241–42 pharmacies, 50 phase transitions, 294–97 phones automatic updates of, 62 cameras in, 34 and clouds, 126 and decentralized communications, 129–31 and on-demand model of access, 114 directories, 285 and interactivity, 219 lifespan of apps for, 11 as reading devices, 91–92 in rural China, 56 and self-tracking technology, 239–40 and tracking technology, 239–40, 250, 253 and virtual reality technology, 215, 222 photography and images and artificial intelligence, 33–34 and classic film production, 198–99 and content recognition, 43, 203 and Creative Commons licensing, 139 democratization of, 77 and digital storage capacity, 266 and facial recognition, 39, 43 flexible images, 204 and Google Photo, 43 and lifelogging, 248–49 and new media genres, 195 and photo captioning, 51 and reproductive imperative, 87 sharing of, 140 Picard, Rosalind, 220 Picasso, Pablo, 288 Pichai, Sundar, 37 Pine, Joseph, 172–73 Pinterest, 32, 136, 139, 140, 183 piracy, 124 placebo effect, 242 platform synergy, 122–25, 131 PlayStation Now, 109 porn sites, 202–3 postal mail, 253 postindustrial economy, 57 “presence,” 216–17 printing, 85, 87. See also books privacy, 124, 253, 255 processing speeds, 293 Progressive Insurance, 251 Project Jacquard, 225 Project Sansa, 218 property rights, 207–8 prosumers (freelancers), 113, 115, 116–17, 148, 149 proxy data gathering, 255 public commons, 121–22 public key encryption, 260–61 publishing and publishers, 149 purchase histories, 169 Quantified Self Meetup groups, 238–40 Quantimetric Self Sensing, 247 quantum computing, 284 Quid, 32 Quinn, David, 17 Radiohead, 72 randomized double-blind trials, 242 reading, 89, 91–92, 94–95, 103–4.

Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Hinders Scientific Progress, Harms the Planet, and Threatens Our Lives
by Michael Specter
Published 14 Apr 2009

You know, the type weighed down by silly rules and conventional thought. Like every alternative healer, Weil believes in the supremacy of faith and compassion. I certainly wouldn’t argue against faith (if only because for many people it provides the single form of alternative medicine that seems clearly to work, a placebo effect). And here is my definition of compassion: the desire to alleviate suffering. Nothing in the course of human history meets that definition so fully as the achievements of evidence-based, scientifically verifiable medicine. The world of CAM is powered by theories that have almost never been tested successfully, and its proponents frequently cite that fact as proof of their unique value, as if they represent a movement that cannot be confined (or defined) by trivialities.

…

And you know, I think any physician is aware that some of the confidence you build in someone is part of helping them get better, and when is that being a confidence man? That tension is kind of inherent in healing practices. It’s interesting; it’s not easily solvable.” Briggs has become fascinated with the causes of the placebo effect—how it works on a biochemical level, and why. That the mind can affect the chemistry of the human body is not in doubt, and researchers have shown direct relationships between what a patient expects from a drug and its therapeutic results. In one experiment, Fabrizio Benedetti, professor of clinical and applied physiology at the University of Turin Medical School in Italy, demonstrated that a saline solution works just as well as conventional medicine to reduce tremors and muscle stiffness in people with Parkinson’s disease.

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See also race Age of Autism ageism Aggrastat agriculture. See organic foods AIDS activism AIDS deniers AIDS epidemic AIDS virus albuterol Aleve (naproxen) alternative medicines and antioxidents and Briggs CAM dangers of deregulation of and food additives and food labeling and health care and HIV/AIDS homeopathy and nutrition and placebo effect and snake oil and supplements and Weil Alzheimer’s disease amalgam protestors American Association for the Advancement of Science American Medical Association (AMA) American Museum of Natural History, New York American Neurological Association, Eugenical Sterilization Ames, Bruce N.

Diet for a New America
by John Robbins

However, in 1960, there appeared in the American Journal of Cardiology a remarkable report that shed a completely different light on the reasons why angina sufferers who underwent the surgery experienced decreased pain.26 It seems that a number of surgeons, aware that this particular procedure had never been adequately tested and also aware that angina is notoriously responsive to placebo treatment, had begun to consider the possibility that the patients experienced a decrease in pain only because they believed in the surgery—in other words, that this major operation was, in fact, totally worthless. Doctors have known for centuries of the placebo effect. You can give patients pills specifically designed to be devoid of any conceivable medical efficacy, and some of these patients, because they believe they are receiving substances with genuine medical value, will report improvement. Now doctors were beginning to consider the staggering possibility that the reported benefits from the angina surgery were the result of a placebo effect. How were they to find out? It’s relatively easy to test pills for a placebo effect. You simply do a double-blind study, giving some patients the real thing, others placebos, and see what happens.

…

They then reported the results in the American Journal of Cardiology.27 Amazingly, the patients who underwent the sham surgery reported the same degree of angina relief as those undergoing the real surgery! The verdict was unavoidable. The fashionable operation had derived its efficacy entirely from the placebo effect. Surgeons now realized that this operation was no longer ethically justifiable. But they were not so easily to be deprived of a chance to operate on angina sufferers. They conceived an even more intrusive procedure—internal mammary artery implant. This involved poking a hole in the heart muscle, cutting the artery, and then inserting the cut end of the artery into the heart, hoping it would sprout new branches, thus supplementing the coronary arteries and bringing more blood to the heart.

…

No one ever put this procedure to the test of comparison with sham surgery. However, autopsies later done on patients who received this surgery showed that the implanted arteries had not sprouted new branches or provided any new blood supplies to the heart, as had been hoped. In short, any success this massive intervention had was due, again, to the placebo effect. So great had been the faith of the patients in surgery as a healing modality, that even though they underwent traumatic surgery that was, in fact, physically worthless, many of them reported symptomatic relief. It seems we haven’t even begun to scratch the surface of understanding how profound and powerful a thing faith is.

How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
Published 30 Apr 2018

“That’s above my pay grade,” Tony Bossis said with a shrug when I asked him whether he thought the experiences of cosmic consciousness described by his patients were fictive or real. Asked the same question, Bill Richards cited William James, who suggested we judge the mystical experience not by its veracity, which is unknowable, but by “its fruits”: Does it turn someone’s life in a positive direction? Many researchers acknowledge that a strong placebo effect may be at work when a drug as suggestible as psilocybin is administered by medical professionals with legal and institutional sanction: under such conditions, the expectations of the therapist are much more likely to be fulfilled by the patient. (And bad trips are much less likely to occur.) Here we bump into one of the richer paradoxes of the psilocybin trials: while it succeeds in no small part because it has the sanction and authority of science, its effectiveness seems to depend on a mystical experience that leaves people convinced there is more to this world than science can explain.

…

In early studies with small samples, the researchers, who are usually biased in favor of finding an effect, have the luxury of selecting the volunteers most likely to respond. Because their number is so small, these volunteers benefit from the care and attention of exceptionally well-trained and dedicated therapists, who are also biased in favor of success. Also, the placebo effect is usually strongest in a new medicine and tends to fade over time, as observed in the case of antidepressants; they don’t work nearly as well today as they did upon their introduction in the 1980s. None of these psychedelic therapies have yet proven themselves to work in large populations; what successes have been reported should be taken as promising signals standing out from the noise of data, rather than as definitive proofs of cure.

…

abuse of psychedelics, low risk of, 50 Acid Tests, 184, 206 active placebos, psychedelics as, 159 Adamic moments, 25 addiction, 358–75 and autobiographical narratives, 387–88, 391 and awe-inspiring experiences, 373–75 and ayahuasca, 369n banality of insights after treatments, 361–62, 363–64 and default mode network, 387–88 depression’s links to, 383 and ego dissolution, 271, 366 and excess of order in brain, 313, 329, 385 and mental time travel, 387 and negative thinking habits, 383 Nutt’s conclusions on, 300n and overview effect, 359–60 and rat park experiment, 372–73 and risks of psychedelics, 14, 30 See also alcoholism; smoking cessation Addiction Research Foundation in Toronto, 151 adrenaline, 146 afterglow of psychedelic experiences, 24–25, 254 agnostics and atheists mystical experiences of, 74, 222, 284–85, 345 and value of meaning, 355 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA), 141, 152–53, 370 alcoholism and Bill W’s psychedelic experiences, 152–53, 370 and Hubbard’s treatment facilities, 171 LSD as treatment for, 141, 148–53, 368–69, 370 and Osmond/Hoffer’s research, 170 and personal history/environment, 370–72 peyote used to treat, 368 and psychotherapy, 369 results from treatment of, 368–69 and Spring Grove’s research, 57, 218 and suppression of psychedelic research, 141–42 Allen, Don, 176–77, 178, 181n, 198, 206n Alpert, Richard (later Ram Dass) and counterculture, 205 criticisms of research, 194, 195 defense of research, 196 dismissal from Harvard, 202–3 and Fadiman, 177 and Harvard Psilocybin Project, 188, 189, 190 and International Federation for Internal Freedom, 203 and Johnson, 360 post-Harvard life of, 205 and psychedelics’ escape from the lab, 197 and Weil, 202–3 Altered States of Consciousness (Tart), 99 altruistic behavior, 373–74 amadou, 87, 117 American Psychiatric Association (APA), 141 Ampex, 44, 176 Animals and Psychedelics (Samorini), 123–24 animals’ consumption of Psilocybes, 93, 98, 122–23 antidepressants discovery of, 147 and loss of effectiveness, 335 and neurochemistry field, 293 and placebo effect, 335n, 382 range of disorders addressed by, 383 anxiety and autobiographical narratives, 387–88 and default mode network, 387–88 and effect of psychedelics on ego, 271 and mental time travel, 387 and negative thinking habits, 383 during psychedelic experiences, 46, 63 and psycholytic LSD therapy, 156, 159 rumination in, 383 Apollo astronauts, 358–59, 373 artificial intelligence (AI), 325–26 authority of psychedelic experiences, 59, 71, 346, 365–66 autism, 37 autobiographical self, 304, 387–88, 391 awe, experiences of, 306, 373–75, 389 ayahuasca in addiction treatments, 369n in group settings, 405 lack of research on, 18 and Pollan’s psychedelic journeys, 410–13 ritual use of, 402, 404 and UDV court case, 27–28 Aztecs, 2, 108–9 bad trips and backlash against psychedelics, 3 and expectations of therapist, 347 first bad trip, 24 in general population, 209 and LSD therapy for alcoholism, 152 and role of guides, 405 and role of setting, 14 Weil’s “treatment” for, 210 Balick, Michael, 107 Barlow, John Perry, 183 Bay Area tech community, 171, 175–83, 181n Bayesian inferences, 261–63 Bazer, Dinah, 284–85, 344–45, 355 Be Here Now (Ram Dass), 205 Beatles, 143, 204 Beckley Foundation, 228, 297, 299 behaviorism, 149 being/doing duality, 280–81, 282 belladonna, 152, 370 Belser, Alexander, 351 Bergson, Henri, 56, 162 Bessant, Charles, 360, 361, 362–63 Beug, Michael, 101, 121–23 “Bicycle Day” (April 19), 24 Bigwood, Jeremy, 101 bioterrorism, 89 birth experiences, 155, 176, 240, 279–80, 341–42, 344 Blake, William, 82, 161, 194 Bogenschutz, Michael, 369, 370–72 Boothby, Richard, 65, 67–68, 69, 70, 72, 75 Bossis, Tony on authenticity questions, 347 and Bazer’s therapy, 344–45 on cultural fear of death, 404 and Mettes’s therapy, 336, 337–38, 340–43, 346, 357 on results with cancer patients, 336 on role of guides, 402 The Botany of Desire (Pollan), 12–13 brain science, 2–3, 24.

Come as You Are: The Surprising New Science That Will Transform Your Sex Life
by Emily Nagoski Ph.d.
Published 3 Mar 2015

Once you’ve read this chapter, I want you to feel that your accelerator and your brakes are as basic, as integral to your sexual functioning, as your clitoris and your desire. If I do my job in the next few pages, you’ll be telling everyone you know: “OMG, everybody, there’s a brake!” The Power of Context Erectile dysfunction drugs don’t improve women’s sexual functioning, but they do have one of the strongest placebo effects observed in medical research. Around 40 percent of participants in the placebo group of a clinical trial of sexual dysfunction medication report that the “drug”—actually a sugar pill—improved their sex lives; this is a response size so large that one particularly brilliant study reported only the effects of an eight-week “treatment” with a placebo.2 This is just one small hint at the power of context in shaping our sexual experience, which we’ll discuss in chapter 3.

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Something particularly interesting about the study of brain functioning in people with chronic back pain: When they directed their attention to the burning sensation on the skin of their back, they reported that the heat hurt; when they directed their attention to the pain in the muscles of their back, they reported that the heat felt good. Where we focus our attention is part of context. The NAc even appears to be important in placebo studies (Zubieta and Stohler, “Neurobiological Mechanisms of Placebo Responses; Tracey, “Getting the Pain You Expect”). Remember the placebo effect from chapter 2—about 40 percent of people taking a sugar pill that they are told will increase their interest in sex, do indeed experience more interest in sex. I expect that future research will find that the nucleus accumbens is involved in that effect. 15. Berridge and Kringelbach, “Neuroscience of Affect,” 295. 16.

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behaviors Avoidant attachment style, 139–40, 141 Backdraft, 182 Bacon, Linda, 169 Bancroft, John, 4, 48 Barbarella (film), 287 Bartholin’s glands, 30 Beach, Frank, 230, 231 Beauty, recognizing one’s own, 162–65 Becoming Orgasmic (Heiman and LoPiccolo), 266 Behavioral view of sex, 3–5 Bergner, Daniel, 75, 135, 206 Berridge, Kent, 86 Blast from the Past (film), 301 Blastocysts, 20 Blum, Deborah, 135 Body scans, 122 Body self-criticism, 153–54, 156, 163–67, 187, 329, 353n4 clinging to, 166–67, 177 cognitive dissonance vs., 182 consequences of, 163 self-compassion vs., 177–78 Bonobo copulation, images of, 194, 207, 208 Bottom-up approach to coping with trauma, 128–29 Brain, 40 arousal nonconcordance and, 197–99, 221–22 context and, 75–76, 80–83, 94 desire and, 233–34 dual control model and, 48, 60 imaging studies of, 132 pleasure centers of, 84 stress and, 117–18 Brain stem parabrachial nucleus, 84 Breathing technique, 268 Brotto, Lori, 238–39 Buck, Ross, 199 Bulb of penis, 22 Bulb of vestibule, 22, 274–75 Camilla (composite), 7, 149, 326 arousal nonconcordance and, 191–92, 221 context and, 70–71, 92–93 cultural messages and, 161–62 desire and, 225, 228–29 dual control model and, 58–59 on genital diversity, 33–34 orgasm and, 278–79, 314–15 trauma and, 126–27 Carpopedal spasms, 44 Central nervous system, 48, 197–99 Challenges, meaningful, 246–47 Chamberlin, Kristen, 129 Chasing dynamic, 89, 226, 238, 318 described, 245 desperate measures to defuse, 251–55 Chivers, Meredith, 194, 210 Christmas Carol, A (Dickens), 145–46 Chronic stressors, 120–21 Circumcision (male), 26 Clitoral hood, 22, 23 Clitoris, 19, 20–25, 44 anatomy of, 17, 20–23, 22 distance between urethra and, 16, 274 early scientific view of, 277 manual exploration of, 23 orgasm through stimulation of, 272, 274, 275, 292, 322 size of, 15–16, 205–6 visual exploration of, 23–25, 41 Cocaine addicts, study of, 90 Coffey, Kelly, 168–69 Cognitive-based therapy, 128 Cognitive dissonance, 156, 182 Common humanity, 178, 317 Conception-arousal myth, 210, 276, 277 Condoms, 219, 220 Context, 5–6, 70–108. See also Cultural context; Emotional context arousal nonconcordance and, 212–13 desire and, 223–29, 239 dual control model and, 65, 67–68, 78–79, 92 importance of understanding, 91–92 meta-emotions and, 322–23 orgasm and, 270–71, 280, 282–86 placebo effect and, 47 pleasure and, 291, 302 sensation and, 77–83, 94 two elements in, 75 worksheets, 95–108 Corpora cavernosa, 21, 22 Corpus spongiosum, 21, 22 Cosmopolitan (magazine), 161 Cowper’s gland, 30 Criterion velocity, 235–36, 281, 289, 300 changing, 320–21 defined, 235 Crura of clitoris, 21, 22 Crura of penis, 22 Crying, 122, 137–38, 290 Cues for sexual desire study, 72–73 worksheet, 107–8 Cujo (film), 194 Cultural context, 6, 153–88.

In defense of food: an eater's manifesto
by Michael Pollan
Published 15 Dec 2008

For every diet hypothesis you test, you can construct an alternative hypothesis based on the presence or absence of the substitute nutrient. It gets messy. And then there is the placebo effect, which has always bedeviled nutrition research. About a third of Americans are what researchers call responders—people who will respond to a treatment or intervention regardless of whether they’ve actually received it. When testing a drug you can correct for this by using a placebo in your trial, but how do you correct for the placebo effect in the case of a dietary trial? You can’t: Low-fat foods seldom taste like the real thing, and no person is ever going to confuse a meat entrée for a vegetarian substitute.

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getting over as ideology lipid hypothesis and low-fat diet and O’Dea’s avoidance of processed food and rise of sacrificing pleasure and nutrition science authority of and eating plants food industry and food studied out of diet context in health claims and limits of lipid hypothesis and nutrients studied out of context of food in reductionism of shift from food culture to shifting grounds of nuts Oakland, Calif., rickets in oat bran oats obesity Ames’s theory of Harvard theory of omega-3s and refined carbohydrates and Western diet and O’Dea, Kerin oils: in flour see also vegetable oils Okinawa olive oil omega-3 fatty acids deficiencies of in flour foods fortified with omega-6 compared with role of omega-6 fatty acids role of omnivores Omnivore’s Dilemma, The (Pollan) ”1A plus 2B,” oranges Organic Center organic food orthorexics overnutrition overweight Packer, The parking-lot science pasta peaches peanut butter pellagra Perfection Salad (Shapiro) Perry, George H. pesticides Petrini, Carlo phosphorus photosynthesis phytic acid phytochemicals phytoestrogens pigs placebo effect plants, plant food absence of for animals biodiversity and as diet mainstay freezer use and growth of omega-3 fatty acids in protein from shift from leaves to seeds of and skepticism for nontraditional foods supplements and traditional diets and well-grown and healthy soil rule for wild foods and wine use and pleasure, eating and nutritionism and ”Pleasures of Eating, The” (Berry) polyphenols polyunsaturated fat saturated fat vs.

The 4-Hour Body: An Uncommon Guide to Rapid Fat-Loss, Incredible Sex, and Becoming Superhuman
by Timothy Ferriss
Published 1 Dec 2010

After I found that flaxseed oil improved balance, I used self-experimentation to figure out the best dose (three to four tablespoons per day). One complaint about self-experimentation is that you’re not “blind.” Maybe the treatment works because you expect it to work. A placebo effect. I have never seen a case where this appeared to have happened. When treatment 10 helps after treatments 1 through 9 have failed to help (my usual experience), it’s unlikely to be a placebo effect. Accidental discoveries cannot be placebo effects. My experience has shown that improve-your-life self-experimentation is remarkably powerful. I wasn’t an expert in anything I studied—I’m not a sleep expert, for example—but I repeatedly found useful cause-and-effect relationships (breakfast causes early awakening, flaxseed oil improves balance, etc.) that the experts had missed.

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There are a few potential explanations: HOMEOPATHIC REMEDIES WORK AS ADVERTISED The water actually retains some “essential property” of the original substance because of the beatings and shakings. I give this a 0% probability. It violates the most basic laws of science and makes my head hurt. THE PLACEBO EFFECT I didn’t realize it was a homeopathic remedy until after four or five doses, and I had been told it could reduce pain by up to 50% in 24 hours. Placebo is strong stuff. People can become intoxicated from alcohol placebos, and “placebo” knee surgeries for osteoarthritis, where incisions are made but nothing is repaired, can produce results that rival the real deal.

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Nutrition Data nuts: Brazil nuts, 22.1, 46.1, 46.2 and cholesterol overeating and testosterone as travel snack O Obama, Michelle obesity, 9.1, 9.2 observer effect Occam’s Protocol adapting the program cardio frequency objective of, 18.1, 18.2 Occam’s feeding, 17.1, 18.1 Occam’s frequency Occam’s prescriptions questions and criticisms slower gains starting weights Occam’s Razor ofuro oil, rancid oligosaccharides OneTaste, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3, 20.4 oral contraceptives orange juice orgasm: and bad science clitoral glans and clitoris, 20.1, 20.2 definition of Doing Method, 20.1, 20.2, 20.3 facilitation of female focused repetition for and grounding and g-spot, 19.1, 20.1 guidelines for beginners and masturbation, 19.1, 20.1 positions practice and how-to precondition the quest questions about vibrator for O’Rourke, Dara Ottey, Merlene Joyce oversimplification Owen (monkey) oxygen-assisted static apnea Ozolin, Nikolay P Pagan, Eben PAGG warnings about Paleolithic “paleo” diet palmitoleic acid Palumbo, Dave “Jumbo,” 150, 13.1, 17.1 Parazynski, Scott Pareto, Vilfredo Pareto’s Law Parisi, Bill Parkinson’s Law partial completeness Paul (testosterone) Pavlina, Steve PC (phosphocreatine) PC (pubococcygeus) muscle Pearl, Bill pear shape peer pressure Penn, B. J. periodization Perls, Tom Phelps, Michael pheromones Phillips, Bill phlebotomy phosphocreatine (PC) phosphoric acid photos, before/after, 6.1, 6.2, 6.3 Picasso, Pablo placebo effect, 29.1, 42.1, 44.1 platelet-rich plasma (PRP) Plato, Peggy, 3.1, 16.1 Plese, Elliott plyometrics Polanyi, John policosanol, 10.1, 10.2 Poliquin, Charles, 16.1, 17.1, 22.1, 25.1, 46.1 Pollan, Michael, 43.1, 48.1 polysomnograms poo, weighing pork belly Portland Marathon Pose Method, 30.1, 30.2, 31.1 potassium Pottenger, Francis M.

New Market Wizards: Conversations With America's Top Traders
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 28 Jan 1994

In the seminar example you just cited, isn’t it also possible that people will feel and perform better because of the placebo effect? For that matter, isn’t it possible that the results attributed to NLP may also be a placebo effect? Charles Faulkner / 419 In part, this contention may be valid, and it fascinates me that this is supposed to be a criticism. Medical science researchers take the view that the placebo effect is something had. You can hear it in their language: “We have to rule out the placebo effect.” However, Bandler and Grinder looked at it differently. They saw the placebo effect as a natural human ability—the ability of the brain to heal the rest of the body.

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They saw the placebo effect as a natural human ability—the ability of the brain to heal the rest of the body. This actually presents exciting possibilities. What if this ability can be called forth when we want it or need it’? What if our brains can literally make us feel better’? NLP is concerned with results. If the favorable results are partially due to the placebo effect—that is, the natural ability of the brain to affect how we feel, heal, and function, mentally and physically—let’s use it deliberately. NLP makes claims of being able to change behaviors and feelings very quickly through simple mental exercises. Can you give me an example of such an exercise in order to give readers who are completely unfamiliar with NLP some flavor of the approach?

The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect
by Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie
Published 1 Mar 2018

First let’s take the worst-case scenario: none of the noncompliers would have improved if they had complied with treatment. In that case, the only people who would have taken the drug and improved would be the 47.3 percent who actually did comply and improve. But we need to correct this estimate for the placebo effect, which is in the third row of the table. Out of the people who were assigned the placebo and took the placebo, 8.1 percent improved. So the net improvement above and beyond the placebo effect is 47.3 percent minus 8.1 percent, or 39.2 percent. What about the best-case scenario, in which all the noncompliers would have improved if they had complied? In this case we add the noncompliers’ 31.5 percent plus 7.3 percent to the 39.2 percent baseline we just computed, for a total of 78.0 percent.

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The second assumption in Rubin’s model, also benign, is called “consistency.” It says that a person who took aspirin and recovered would also recover if given aspirin by experimental design. This reasonable assumption, which is a theorem in the SCM framework, says in effect that the experiment is free of placebo effects and other imperfections. But the major assumption that potential outcome practitioners are invariably required to make is called “ignorability.” It is more technical, but it’s the crucial part of the transaction, for it is in essence the same thing as Jamie Robins and Sander Greenland’s condition of exchangeability discussed in Chapter 4.

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Likewise, we can summarize the effect of citrus fruits on scurvy by the causal model Citrus Fruits Vitamin C Scurvy. We want to ask certain typical questions about a mediator: Does it account for the entire effect? Does Drug B work exclusively through blood pressure or perhaps through other mechanisms as well? The placebo effect is a common type of mediator in medicine: if a drug acts only through the patient’s belief in its benefit, most doctors will consider it ineffective. Mediation is also an important concept in the law. If we ask whether a company discriminated against women when it paid them lower salaries, we are asking a mediation question.

Pale Rider: The Spanish Flu of 1918 and How It Changed the World
by Laura Spinney
Published 31 May 2017

Coughs and sneezes 2. The monads of Leibniz PART TWO: Anatomy of a Pandemic 3. Ripples on a pond 4. Like a thief in the night PART THREE: Manhu, or What is it? 5. Disease eleven 6. The doctors’ dilemma 7. The wrath of God PART FOUR: The Survival Instinct 8. Chalking doors with crosses 9. The placebo effect 10. Good Samaritans PART FIVE: Post Mortem 11. The hunt for patient zero 12. Counting the dead PART SIX: Science Redeemed 13. Aenigmoplasma influenzae 14. Beware the barnyard 15. The human factor PART SEVEN: The Post-Flu World 16. The green shoots of recovery 17. Alternate histories 18.

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The shah eventually rebuilt Mashed on a rectilinear plan, linked it to Tehran by a modern road, and demolished its graveyards. Hoffman, who stayed on there until 1947, witnessed the transformation: ‘The bones of centuries were shovelled into wheelbarrows and dumped into unmarked pits, the gravestones being used for street curbs and sidewalks.’31 9 The placebo effect Much like today, when a person was sick in Europe or America in the late nineteenth century, he could go to a ‘regular’ doctor, or he could go to a homeopath, a naturopath, an osteopath or a faith healer–or he could hedge his bets and go to all five. The difference between then and now was that the regular doctor had no special status.

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In China, besides parading the figures of dragon kings through their towns, people went to public baths to sweat out the evil winds, smoked opium and took yin qiao san–a powdered mix of honeysuckle and forsythia that had been developed under the Qing for ‘winter sickness’. Most of these ‘cures’ were no more effective than placebos. The placebo effect is a manifestation of the power of positive thinking. It derives from a person’s expectation that a drug or other intervention will heal them, and it can be extremely effective in itself. According to some estimates, 35–40 per cent of all medical prescriptions today are not much more than placebos.6 The interesting thing about a placebo is how sensitive it is to the trust that is established between a patient and his doctor.

The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values
by Sam Harris
Published 5 Oct 2010

Science, 275 (5304), 1293–1295. Begg, I. M., Robertson, R. K., Gruppuso, V., Anas, A., & Needham, D. R. (1996). The Illusory-knowledge effect. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 410–433. Benedetti, F., Mayberg, H. S., Wager, T. D., Stohler, C. S., & Zubieta, J. K. (2005). Neurobiological mechanisms of the placebo effect. J Neurosci, 25 (45), 10390–10402. Benedict, R. (1934). Patterns of culture. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin. Benjamin, J., Li, L., Patterson, C., Greenberg, B. D., Murphy, D. L., & Hamer, D. H. (1996). Population and familial association between the D4 dopamine receptor gene and measures of novelty seeking.

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Towards a functional neuroanatomy of self processing: Effects of faces and words. Brain Res Cogn Brain Res, 10 (1–2), 133–144. Kircher, T. T., Senior, C., Phillips, M. L., Rabe-Hesketh, S., Benson, P. J., Bullmore, E. T., et al. (2001). Recognizing one’s own face. Cognition, 78 (1), B1–B15. Kirsch, I. (2000). Are drug and placebo effects in depression additive? Biol Psychiatry, 47 (8), 733–735. Klayman, J., & Ha, Y. W. (1987). Confirmation, disconfirmation, and information in hypothesis testing. Psychological Review, 94 (2), 211–228. Koenig, L. B., McGue, M., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2005). Genetic and environmental influences on religiousness: Findings for retrospective and current religiousness ratings.

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Time of conscious intention to act in relation to onset of cerebral activity (readiness-potential). The unconscious initiation of a freely voluntary act. Brain, 106 (Pt. 3), 623–642. Lieberman, M. D., Jarcho, J. M., Berman, S., Naliboff, B. D., Suyenobu, B. Y., Mandelkern, M., et al. (2004). The neural correlates of placebo effects: a disruption account. Neuroimage, 22 (1), 447–455. Litman, L., & Reber, A. S. (2005). Implicit cognition and thought. In K. J. Holyoak & R. G. Morrison (Eds.), The Cambridge handbook of thinking and reasoning (pp. 431–453). New York: Cambridge University Press. Livingston, K. R. (2005).

T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone That Dominates and Divides Us
by Carole Hooven
Published 12 Jul 2021

Brown-Séquard, “Note on the Effects Produced on Man by Subcutaneous Injections of a Liquid Obtained from the Testicles of Animals,” Lancet 134, no. 3438 (1889): 105–107. Testes from accident victims: Erica R. Freeman, David A. Bloom, and Edward J. McGuire, “A Brief History of Testosterone,” Journal of Urology 165, no. 2 (2001): 371–73. almost certainly due to the placebo effect: Andrea J. Cussons, John P. Walsh, Chotoo I. Bhagat, and Stephen J. Fletcher, “Brown-Séquard Revisited: A Lesson from History on the Placebo Effect of Androgen Treatment,” Medical Journal of Australia 177, no. 11 (2002): 678–79. The restorative powers of organ extracts: Eberhard Nieschlag and Susan Nieschlag, “The History of Discovery, Synthesis and Development of Testosterone for Clinical Use,” European Journal of Endocrinology 180, no. 6 (2019): R201–R212.

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If you feel listless, your libido is falling, your erection not quite up to snuff, your muscle mass down, just click a few links on the internet and delivered to your front door will be a version of Brown-Séquard’s elixir. The restorative powers of organ extracts that Brown-Séquard reported so convincingly were almost certainly due to the placebo effect (knowing that might also be true of my eye cream never stops me from using it!). Although he jump-started a dubious medical industry, Brown-Séquard did leave a positive legacy. As he presciently remarked in the British medical journal the Lancet, “The results show that this important subject should be further investigated experimentally.”

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The evidence here is not straightforward, but some studies have shown that men with depression are more likely to have T levels on the lower end of normal (or even below that), and raising T under these circumstances may help to alleviate some of the symptoms of depression. But for men with healthy, normal levels of T who do not have a mood disorder, if there is a positive effect of T on mood, it is small. Perhaps Stella did experience a mood boost directly from her T shot. On the other hand, the placebo effect can also be powerful. The changes in anger in T transitions are not consistent, which isn’t surprising, since the frequency of feeling and expressing anger doesn’t differ much between males and females. As we’ve seen, the sexes do differ in physical aggression, and T has a major role in explaining this.

Super Thinking: The Big Book of Mental Models
by Gabriel Weinberg and Lauren McCann
Published 17 Jun 2019

Interestingly, just the act of receiving something that you expect to have a positive effect can actually create one, called the placebo effect. While placebos have little effect on some things, like healing a broken bone, the placebo effect can bring about observed benefits for numerous ailments. The BMJ review reported that in 74 percent of the trials, patients receiving the fake surgeries saw some improvement in their symptoms, and in 51 percent of the trials, they improved about as much as the recipients of actual surgeries. For some conditions, there is even evidence to suggest that the placebo effect isn’t purely a figment of the imagination. As an example, placebo “pain relievers” can produce brain activity consistent with the activity produced by actual pain-relieving drugs.

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Department of, 97 just world hypothesis, 22 Kahneman, Daniel, 9, 30, 90 karoshi, 82 Kauffman Foundation, 122 keeping up with the Joneses, 210–11 key person insurance, 305 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 129, 225 KISS (Keep It Simple, Stupid), 10 knowledge, institutional, 257 knowns: known, 197 unknown, 198, 203 known unknowns, 197–98 Knox, Robert E., 91 Kodak, 302–3, 308–10, 312 Koenigswald, Gustav Heinrich Ralph von, 50 Kohl’s, 15 Kopelman, Josh, 301 Korea, 229, 231, 235, 238 Kristof, Nicholas, 254 Krokodil, 49 Kruger, Justin, 269 Kuhn, Thomas, 24 Kutcher, Ashton, 121 labor market, 283–84 laggards, 116–17 landlords, 178, 179, 182, 188 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 132 large numbers, law of, 143–44 Latané, Bibb, 259 late majority, 116–17 lateral thinking, 201 law of diminishing returns, 81–83 law of diminishing utility, 81–82 law of inertia, 102–3, 105–8, 110, 112, 113, 119, 120, 129, 290, 296 law of large numbers, 143–44 law of small numbers, 143, 144 Lawson, Jerry, 289 lawsuits, 231 leadership, 248, 255, 260, 265, 271, 275, 276, 278–80 learned helplessness, 22–23 learning, 262, 269, 295 from past events, 271–72 learning curve, 269 Le Chatelier, Henri-Louis, 193 Le Chatelier’s principle, 193–94 left to their own devices, 275 Leibniz, Gottfried, 291 lemons into lemonade, 121 Lernaean Hydra, 51 Levav, Jonathan, 63 lever, 78 leverage, 78–80, 83, 115 high-leverage activities, 79–81, 83, 107, 113 leveraged buyout, 79 leveraging up, 78–79 Levitt, Steven, 44–45 Levitt, Theodore, 296 Lewis, Michael, 289 Lichtenstein, Sarah, 17 lightning, 145 liking, 216–17, 220 Lincoln, Abraham, 97 Lindy effect, 105, 106, 112 line in the sand, 238 LinkedIn, 7 littering, 41, 42 Lloyd, William, 37 loans, 180, 182–83 lobbyists, 216, 306 local optimum, 195–96 lock-in, 305 lock in your gains, 90 long-term negative scenarios, 60 loose versus tight, in organizational culture, 274 Lorenz, Edward, 121 loss, 91 loss aversion, 90–91 loss leader strategy, 236–37 lost at sea, 68 lottery, 85–86, 126, 145 low-context communication, 273–74 low-hanging fruit, 81 loyalists versus mercenaries, 276–77 luck, 128 making your own, 122 luck surface area, 122, 124, 128 Luft, Joseph, 196 LuLaRoe, 217 lung cancer, 133–34, 173 Lyautey, Hubert, 276 Lyft, ix, 288 Madoff, Bernie, 232 magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), 291 magnets, 194 maker’s schedule versus manager’s schedule, 277–78 Making of Economic Society, The (Heilbroner), 49 mammograms, 160–61 management debt, 56 manager’s schedule versus maker’s schedule, 277–78 managing to the person, 255 Manhattan Project, 195 Man in the High Castle, The (Dick), 201 manipulative insincerity, 264 man-month, 279 Mansfield, Peter, 291 manufacturer’s suggested retail price (MSRP), 15 margin of error, 154 markets, 42–43, 46–47, 106 failure in, 47–49 labor, 283–84 market norms versus social norms, 222–24 market power, 283–85, 312 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 secondary, 281–82 winner-take-most, 308 marriage: divorce, 231, 305 same-sex, 117, 118 Maslow, Abraham, 177, 270–71 Maslow’s hammer, xi, 177, 255, 297, 317 Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, 270–71 mathematics, ix–x, 3, 4, 132, 178 Singapore math, 23–24 matrices, 2 × 2, 125–26 consensus-contrarian, 285–86, 290 consequence-conviction, 265–66 Eisenhower Decision Matrix, 72–74, 89, 124, 125 of knowns and unknowns, 197–98 payoff, 212–15, 238 radical candor, 263–64 scatter plot on top of, 126 McCain, John, 241 mean, 146, 149, 151 regression to, 146, 286 standard deviation from, 149, 150–51, 154 variance from, 149 measles, 39, 40 measurable target, 49–50 median, 147 Medicare, 54–55 meetings, 113 weekly one-on-one, 262–63 Megginson, Leon, 101 mental models, vii–xii, 2, 3, 31, 35, 65, 131, 289, 315–17 mentorship, 23, 260, 262, 264, 265 mercenaries versus loyalists, 276–77 Merck, 283 merry-go-round, 108 meta-analysis, 172–73 Metcalfe, Robert, 118 Metcalfe’s law, 118 #MeToo movement, 113 metrics, 137 proxy, 139 Michaels, 15 Microsoft, 241 mid-mortems, 92 Miklaszewski, Jim, 196 Milgram, Stanley, 219, 220 military, 141, 229, 279, 294, 300 milkshakes, 297 Miller, Reggie, 246 Mills, Alan, 58 Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Dweck), 266 mindset, fixed, 266–67, 272 mindset, growth, 266–67 minimum viable product (MVP), 7–8, 81, 294 mirroring, 217 mission, 276 mission statement, 68 MIT, 53, 85 moats, 302–5, 307–8, 310, 312 mode, 147 Moltke, Helmuth von, 7 momentum, 107–10, 119, 129 Monday morning quarterbacking, 271 Moneyball (Lewis), 289 monopolies, 283, 285 Monte Carlo fallacy, 144 Monte Carlo simulation, 195 Moore, Geoffrey, 311 moral hazard, 43–45, 47 most respectful interpretation (MRI), 19–20 moths, 99–101 Mountain Dew, 35 moving target, 136 multiple discovery, 291–92 multiplication, ix, xi multitasking, 70–72, 74, 76, 110 Munger, Charlie, viii, x–xi, 30, 286, 318 Murphy, Edward, 65 Murphy’s law, 64–65, 132 Musk, Elon, 5, 302 mutually assured destruction (MAD), 231 MVP (minimum viable product), 7–8, 81, 294 Mylan, 283 mythical man-month, 279 name-calling, 226 NASA, 4, 32, 33 Nash, John, 213 Nash equilibrium, 213–14, 226, 235 National Football League (NFL), 225–26 National Institutes of Health, 36 National Security Agency, 52 natural selection, 99–100, 102, 291, 295 nature versus nurture, 249–50 negative compounding, 85 negative externalities, 41–43, 47 negative returns, 82–83, 93 negotiations, 127–28 net benefit, 181–82, 184 Netflix, 69, 95, 203 net present value (NPV), 86, 181 network effects, 117–20, 308 neuroticism, 250 New Orleans, La., 41 Newport, Cal, 72 news headlines, 12–13, 221 newspapers, 106 Newsweek, 290 Newton, Isaac, 102, 291 New York Times, 27, 220, 254 Nielsen Holdings, 217 ninety-ninety rule, 89 Nintendo, 296 Nobel Prize, 32, 42, 220, 291, 306 nocebo effect, 137 nodes, 118, 119 No Fly List, 53–54 noise and signal, 311 nonresponse bias, 140, 142, 143 normal distribution (bell curve), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 North Korea, 229, 231, 238 north star, 68–70, 275 nothing in excess, 60 not ready for prime time, 242 “now what” questions, 291 NPR, 239 nuclear chain reaction, viii, 114, 120 nuclear industry, 305–6 nuclear option, 238 Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), 305–6 nuclear weapons, 114, 118, 195, 209, 230–31, 233, 238 nudging, 13–14 null hypothesis, 163, 164 numbers, 130, 146 large, law of, 143–44 small, law of, 143, 144 see also data; statistics nurses, 284 Oakland Athletics, 289 Obama, Barack, 64, 241 objective versus subjective, in organizational culture, 274 obnoxious aggression, 264 observe, orient, decide, act (OODA), 294–95 observer effect, 52, 54 observer-expectancy bias, 136, 139 Ockham’s razor, 8–10 Odum, William E., 38 oil, 105–6 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 O’Neal, Shaquille, 246 one-hundred-year floods, 192 Onion, 211–12 On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (Darwin), 100 OODA loop, 294–95 openness to experience, 250 Operation Ceasefire, 232 opinion, diversity of, 205, 206 opioids, 36 opportunity cost, 76–77, 80, 83, 179, 182, 188, 305 of capital, 77, 179, 182 optimistic probability bias, 33 optimization, premature, 7 optimums, local and global, 195–96 optionality, preserving, 58–59 Oracle, 231, 291, 299 order, 124 balance between chaos and, 128 organizations: culture in, 107–8, 113, 273–80, 293 size and growth of, 278–79 teams in, see teams ostrich with its head in the sand, 55 out-group bias, 127 outliers, 148 Outliers (Gladwell), 261 overfitting, 10–11 overwork, 82 Paine, Thomas, 221–22 pain relievers, 36, 137 Pampered Chef, 217 Pangea, 24–25 paradigm shift, 24, 289 paradox of choice, 62–63 parallel processing, 96 paranoia, 308, 309, 311 Pareto, Vilfredo, 80 Pareto principle, 80–81 Pariser, Eli, 17 Parkinson, Cyril, 74–75, 89 Parkinson’s law, 89 Parkinson’s Law (Parkinson), 74–75 Parkinson’s law of triviality, 74, 89 passwords, 94, 97 past, 201, 271–72, 309–10 Pasteur, Louis, 26 path dependence, 57–59, 194 path of least resistance, 88 Patton, Bruce, 19 Pauling, Linus, 220 payoff matrix, 212–15, 238 PayPal, 72, 291, 296 peak, 105, 106, 112 peak oil, 105 Penny, Jonathon, 52 pent-up energy, 112 perfect, 89–90 as enemy of the good, 61, 89–90 personality traits, 249–50 person-month, 279 perspective, 11 persuasion, see influence models perverse incentives, 50–51, 54 Peter, Laurence, 256 Peter principle, 256, 257 Peterson, Tom, 108–9 Petrified Forest National Park, 217–18 Pew Research, 53 p-hacking, 169, 172 phishing, 97 phones, 116–17, 290 photography, 302–3, 308–10 physics, x, 114, 194, 293 quantum, 200–201 pick your battles, 238 Pinker, Steven, 144 Pirahã, x Pitbull, 36 pivoting, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 placebo, 137 placebo effect, 137 Planck, Max, 24 Playskool, 111 Podesta, John, 97 point of no return, 244 Polaris, 67–68 polarity, 125–26 police, in organizations and projects, 253–54 politics, 70, 104 ads and statements in, 225–26 elections, 206, 218, 233, 241, 271, 293, 299 failure and, 47 influence in, 216 predictions in, 206 polls and surveys, 142–43, 152–54, 160 approval ratings, 152–54, 158 employee engagement, 140, 142 postmortems, 32, 92 Potemkin village, 228–29 potential energy, 112 power, 162 power drills, 296 power law distribution, 80–81 power vacuum, 259–60 practice, deliberate, 260–62, 264, 266 precautionary principle, 59–60 Predictably Irrational (Ariely), 14, 222–23 predictions and forecasts, 132, 173 market for, 205–7 superforecasters and, 206–7 PredictIt, 206 premature optimization, 7 premises, see principles pre-mortems, 92 present bias, 85, 87, 93, 113 preserving optionality, 58–59 pressure point, 112 prices, 188, 231, 299 arbitrage and, 282–83 bait and switch and, 228, 229 inflation in, 179–80, 182–83 loss leader strategy and, 236–37 manufacturer’s suggested retail, 15 monopolies and, 283 principal, 44–45 principal-agent problem, 44–45 principles (premises), 207 first, 4–7, 31, 207 prior, 159 prioritizing, 68 prisoners, 63, 232 prisoner’s dilemma, 212–14, 226, 234–35, 244 privacy, 55 probability, 132, 173, 194 bias, optimistic, 33 conditional, 156 probability distributions, 150, 151 bell curve (normal), 150–52, 153, 163–66, 191 Bernoulli, 152 central limit theorem and, 152–53, 163 fat-tailed, 191 power law, 80–81 sample, 152–53 pro-con lists, 175–78, 185, 189 procrastination, 83–85, 87, 89 product development, 294 product/market fit, 292–96, 302 promotions, 256, 275 proximate cause, 31, 117 proxy endpoint, 137 proxy metric, 139 psychology, 168 Psychology of Science, The (Maslow), 177 Ptolemy, Claudius, 8 publication bias, 170, 173 public goods, 39 punching above your weight, 242 p-values, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 Pygmalion effect, 267–68 Pyrrhus, King, 239 Qualcomm, 231 quantum physics, 200–201 quarantine, 234 questions: now what, 291 what if, 122, 201 why, 32, 33 why now, 291 quick and dirty, 234 quid pro quo, 215 Rabois, Keith, 72, 265 Rachleff, Andy, 285–86, 292–93 radical candor, 263–64 Radical Candor (Scott), 263 radiology, 291 randomized controlled experiment, 136 randomness, 201 rats, 51 Rawls, John, 21 Regan, Ronald, 183 real estate agents, 44–45 recessions, 121–22 reciprocity, 215–16, 220, 222, 229, 289 recommendations, 217 red line, 238 referrals, 217 reframe the problem, 96–97 refugee asylum cases, 144 regression to the mean, 146, 286 regret, 87 regulations, 183–84, 231–32 regulatory capture, 305–7 reinventing the wheel, 92 relationships, 53, 55, 63, 91, 111, 124, 159, 271, 296, 298 being locked into, 305 dating, 8–10, 95 replication crisis, 168–72 Republican Party, 104 reputation, 215 research: meta-analysis of, 172–73 publication bias and, 170, 173 systematic reviews of, 172, 173 see also experiments resonance, 293–94 response bias, 142, 143 responsibility, diffusion of, 259 restaurants, 297 menus at, 14, 62 RetailMeNot, 281 retaliation, 238 returns: diminishing, 81–83 negative, 82–83, 93 reversible decisions, 61–62 revolving door, 306 rewards, 275 Riccio, Jim, 306 rise to the occasion, 268 risk, 43, 46, 90, 288 cost-benefit analysis and, 180 de-risking, 6–7, 10, 294 moral hazard and, 43–45, 47 Road Ahead, The (Gates), 69 Roberts, Jason, 122 Roberts, John, 27 Rogers, Everett, 116 Rogers, William, 31 Rogers Commission Report, 31–33 roles, 256–58, 260, 271, 293 roly-poly toy, 111–12 root cause, 31–33, 234 roulette, 144 Rubicon River, 244 ruinous empathy, 264 Rumsfeld, Donald, 196–97, 247 Rumsfeld’s Rule, 247 Russia, 218, 241 Germany and, 70, 238–39 see also Soviet Union Sacred Heart University (SHU), 217, 218 sacrifice play, 239 Sagan, Carl, 220 sales, 81, 216–17 Salesforce, 299 same-sex marriage, 117, 118 Sample, Steven, 28 sample distribution, 152–53 sample size, 143, 160, 162, 163, 165–68, 172 Sánchez, Ricardo, 234 sanctions and fines, 232 Sanders, Bernie, 70, 182, 293 Sayre, Wallace, 74 Sayre’s law, 74 scarcity, 219, 220 scatter plot, 126 scenario analysis (scenario planning), 198–99, 201–3, 207 schools, see education and schools Schrödinger, Erwin, 200 Schrödinger’s cat, 200 Schultz, Howard, 296 Schwartz, Barry, 62–63 science, 133, 220 cargo cult, 315–16 Scientific Autobiography and other Papers (Planck), 24 scientific evidence, 139 scientific experiments, see experiments scientific method, 101–2, 294 scorched-earth tactics, 243 Scott, Kim, 263 S curves, 117, 120 secondary markets, 281–82 second law of thermodynamics, 124 secrets, 288–90, 292 Securities and Exchange Commission, U.S., 228 security, false sense of, 44 security services, 229 selection, adverse, 46–47 selection bias, 139–40, 143, 170 self-control, 87 self-fulfilling prophecies, 267 self-serving bias, 21, 272 Seligman, Martin, 22 Semmelweis, Ignaz, 25–26 Semmelweis reflex, 26 Seneca, Marcus, 60 sensitivity analysis, 181–82, 185, 188 dynamic, 195 Sequoia Capital, 291 Sessions, Roger, 8 sexual predators, 113 Shakespeare, William, 105 Sheets Energy Strips, 36 Shermer, Michael, 133 Shirky, Clay, 104 Shirky principle, 104, 112 Short History of Nearly Everything, A (Bryson), 50 short-termism, 55–56, 58, 60, 68, 85 side effects, 137 signal and noise, 311 significance, 167 statistical, 164–67, 170 Silicon Valley, 288, 289 simulations, 193–95 simultaneous invention, 291–92 Singapore math, 23–24 Sir David Attenborough, RSS, 35 Skeptics Society, 133 sleep meditation app, 162–68 slippery slope argument, 235 slow (high-concentration) thinking, 30, 33, 70–71 small numbers, law of, 143, 144 smartphones, 117, 290, 309, 310 smoking, 41, 42, 133–34, 139, 173 Snap, 299 Snowden, Edward, 52, 53 social engineering, 97 social equality, 117 social media, 81, 94, 113, 217–19, 241 Facebook, 18, 36, 94, 119, 219, 233, 247, 305, 308 Instagram, 220, 247, 291, 310 YouTube, 220, 291 social networks, 117 Dunbar’s number and, 278 social norms versus market norms, 222–24 social proof, 217–20, 229 societal change, 100–101 software, 56, 57 simulations, 192–94 solitaire, 195 solution space, 97 Somalia, 243 sophomore slump, 145–46 South Korea, 229, 231, 238 Soviet Union: Germany and, 70, 238–39 Gosplan in, 49 in Cold War, 209, 235 space exploration, 209 spacing effect, 262 Spain, 243–44 spam, 37, 161, 192–93, 234 specialists, 252–53 species, 120 spending, 38, 74–75 federal, 75–76 spillover effects, 41, 43 sports, 82–83 baseball, 83, 145–46, 289 football, 226, 243 Olympics, 209, 246–48, 285 Spotify, 299 spreadsheets, 179, 180, 182, 299 Srinivasan, Balaji, 301 standard deviation, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error, 154 standards, 93 Stanford Law School, x Starbucks, 296 startup business idea, 6–7 statistics, 130–32, 146, 173, 289, 297 base rate in, 157, 159, 160 base rate fallacy in, 157, 158, 170 Bayesian, 157–60 confidence intervals in, 154–56, 159 confidence level in, 154, 155, 161 frequentist, 158–60 p-hacking in, 169, 172 p-values in, 164, 165, 167–69, 172 standard deviation in, 149, 150–51, 154 standard error in, 154 statistical significance, 164–67, 170 summary, 146, 147 see also data; experiments; probability distributions Staubach, Roger, 243 Sternberg, Robert, 290 stock and flow diagrams, 192 Stone, Douglas, 19 stop the bleeding, 234 strategy, 107–8 exit, 242–43 loss leader, 236–37 pivoting and, 295–96, 298–301, 308, 311, 312 tactics versus, 256–57 strategy tax, 103–4, 112 Stiglitz, Joseph, 306 straw man, 225–26 Streisand, Barbra, 51 Streisand effect, 51, 52 Stroll, Cliff, 290 Structure of Scientific Revolutions, The (Kuhn), 24 subjective versus objective, in organizational culture, 274 suicide, 218 summary statistics, 146, 147 sunk-cost fallacy, 91 superforecasters, 206–7 Superforecasting (Tetlock), 206–7 super models, viii–xii super thinking, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 surface area, 122 luck, 122, 124, 128 surgery, 136–37 Surowiecki, James, 203–5 surrogate endpoint, 137 surveys, see polls and surveys survivorship bias, 140–43, 170, 272 sustainable competitive advantage, 283, 285 switching costs, 305 systematic review, 172, 173 systems thinking, 192, 195, 198 tactics, 256–57 Tajfel, Henri, 127 take a step back, 298 Taleb, Nassim Nicholas, 2, 105 talk past each other, 225 Target, 236, 252 target, measurable, 49–50 taxes, 39, 40, 56, 104, 193–94 T cells, 194 teams, 246–48, 275 roles in, 256–58, 260 size of, 278 10x, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 Tech, 83 technical debt, 56, 57 technologies, 289–90, 295 adoption curves of, 115 adoption life cycles of, 116–17, 129, 289, 290, 311–12 disruptive, 308, 310–11 telephone, 118–19 temperature: body, 146–50 thermostats and, 194 tennis, 2 10,000-Hour Rule, 261 10x individuals, 247–48 10x teams, 248, 249, 255, 260, 273, 280, 294 terrorism, 52, 234 Tesla, Inc., 300–301 testing culture, 50 Tetlock, Philip E., 206–7 Texas sharpshooter fallacy, 136 textbooks, 262 Thaler, Richard, 87 Theranos, 228 thermodynamics, 124 thermostats, 194 Thiel, Peter, 72, 288, 289 thinking: black-and-white, 126–28, 168, 272 convergent, 203 counterfactual, 201, 272, 309–10 critical, 201 divergent, 203 fast (low-concentration), 30, 70–71 gray, 28 inverse, 1–2, 291 lateral, 201 outside the box, 201 slow (high-concentration), 30, 33, 70–71 super, viii–ix, 3, 316, 318 systems, 192, 195, 198 writing and, 316 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman), 30 third story, 19, 92 thought experiment, 199–201 throwing good money after bad, 91 throwing more money at the problem, 94 tight versus loose, in organizational culture, 274 timeboxing, 75 time: management of, 38 as money, 77 work and, 89 tipping point, 115, 117, 119, 120 tit-for-tat, 214–15 Tōgō Heihachirō, 241 tolerance, 117 tools, 95 too much of a good thing, 60 top idea in your mind, 71, 72 toxic culture, 275 Toys “R” Us, 281 trade-offs, 77–78 traditions, 275 tragedy of the commons, 37–40, 43, 47, 49 transparency, 307 tribalism, 28 Trojan horse, 228 Truman Show, The, 229 Trump, Donald, 15, 206, 293 Trump: The Art of the Deal (Trump and Schwartz), 15 trust, 20, 124, 215, 217 trying too hard, 82 Tsushima, Battle of, 241 Tupperware, 217 TurboTax, 104 Turner, John, 127 turn lemons into lemonade, 121 Tversky, Amos, 9, 90 Twain, Mark, 106 Twitter, 233, 234, 296 two-front wars, 70 type I error, 161 type II error, 161 tyranny of small decisions, 38, 55 Tyson, Mike, 7 Uber, 231, 275, 288, 290 Ulam, Stanislaw, 195 ultimatum game, 224, 244 uncertainty, 2, 132, 173, 180, 182, 185 unforced error, 2, 10, 33 unicorn candidate, 257–58 unintended consequences, 35–36, 53–55, 57, 64–65, 192, 232 Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), 306 unique value proposition, 211 University of Chicago, 144 unknown knowns, 198, 203 unknowns: known, 197–98 unknown, 196–98, 203 urgency, false, 74 used car market, 46–47 U.S.

NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity
by Steve Silberman
Published 24 Aug 2015

Volunteers are randomly assigned to receive either the active drug or an inert placebo, and neither the volunteers nor the experimenters are aware of who is getting the real drug and who is getting the equivalent of sugar pills. Inevitably, both groups of patients will show some improvement because of a phenomenon known as the placebo effect. At the root of the placebo effect is the fact that the attention of medical professionals, in an environment of care, produces beneficial changes in the mind and body of the patient even in the absence of an active drug. Researchers like Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard and Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Milan have discovered that the mere act of swallowing a pill triggers cascades of hormones and neurotransmitters that can reduce pain and inflammation, enhance motor coordination, boost brain activity, lift mood, and improve digestion.

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Researchers like Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard and Fabrizio Benedetti at the University of Milan have discovered that the mere act of swallowing a pill triggers cascades of hormones and neurotransmitters that can reduce pain and inflammation, enhance motor coordination, boost brain activity, lift mood, and improve digestion. These effects are pervasive, as if the body contains a self-healing network that is activated by the knowledge that one is receiving care. (Exercise and meditation also prompt this network into action.) While no one has ever cured cancer or dispelled pneumonia with a sugar pill, powerful placebo effects have been observed in an astonishingly broad range of conditions, from Parkinson’s and hypertension to chronic depression and Crohn’s disease. In placebo-controlled trials, if the volunteers in the placebo group and the experimental group show comparable amounts of benefit, the FDA judges the drug to be ineffective—often at the cost of tens of millions of dollars to the company that spent years developing it.

…

A Navy statistician with access to the raw data concluded that no reliable information about the reaction to the vitamins by various subtypes in the sample population could be obtained by using Rimland’s computer-clustering scheme. Furthermore, the design of the experiment—with parents as evaluators of changes in their children’s behavior—was anything but “blind” in the statistical sense, and a perfect incubator for placebo effects. Rimland knew that accurately gauging the efficacy of new treatments for autism is tricky because the condition is so mercurial. “These children spurt ahead or fall apart periodically for no discernible reason,” he said, “and whatever treatment is being used at the time gets the credit or the blame.”

The No Need to Diet Book: Become a Diet Rebel and Make Friends With Food
by Plantbased Pixie
Published 7 Mar 2019

Usually the foods suggested for elimination tend to be things like sugar, high-carbohydrate foods or processed foods, which tends to result in higher consumption of vegetables, an overall increase in nutrients and feeling healthier. There is also often a strong desire to feel better, because of the high cost involved, and that in itself can produce a placebo effect in the short term, before the increased restriction and anxiety leaves them feeling worse. Dieting Although the focus of orthorexia doesn’t tend to be weight and weight loss, that doesn’t mean that diets don’t play a role. Diets may have gone a little out of fashion, but rather than disappear they have simply been rebranded as ‘lifestyles’.

…

The fact that leading researchers in the field of addiction say there isn’t enough evidence to suggest sugar is addictive, and that calling it addictive isn’t helpful on a public health level,77 is irrelevant and holds little power in the face of scaremongering. The nocebo effect Fearmongering tactics are so powerful that they can produce physical symptoms in people, despite a complete lack of allergy or any real issue with a food. This is the nocebo effect, and shows just how incredible the mind can be. We are all familiar with the placebo effect, whereby improvements in symptoms can occur even without any medical intervention. Give someone a sugar pill and tell them it’s a painkiller and it’s likely that their headache will improve. Place someone on the operating table, cut them open and sew them immediately back up again and they’ll report feeling better afterwards, despite a lack of actual surgery taking place.

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adenosine 210 adolescents 39, 201 adrenaline (hormone) 54, 55, 225 advertising food 91, 165–6 television 169 aerobic exercise 184 ageing population 185, 214, 272 Ainscough, Jess 8 air pollution 237 alcohol intake 33 and sleep 211 and stress 216 Allison, Michelle 5 Alzheimer’s disease 185 American Psychological Association 84 anger 65–7 anorexia nervosa in Fiji 163 hunger and 31 men and 168 and orthorexia 105–7 social media and 155 UK population and 198 anxiety 153–4, 161, 176, 188, 197–9 artificial flavourings 90, 130 artificial vs natural 127–31, 147 atherosclerosis 215–16 avoidance, food 6 ‘bad’ foods 89–90 bad/unhealthy, good/healthy 89–91, 101, 128, 141, 255 balanced diet 39, 45, 70 BDD (body dysmorphic disorder) 192, 199 beauty ideals 17, 109 Beauty Myth, The (Wolf) 248 bias, weight 37–8, 42, 50 quiz 50 binge-eating 39 binge-restrict cycle 84–5 black women, fat 42–3, 273–4 blood lipids 33, 45 blood pressure 29, 33, 45, 145, 184 blood sugar 29, 143, 184, 216 BMI (Body Mass Index) 22–3, 32, 33–4 body dissatisfaction eating disorders and 18, 103 girls/women and 164, 167 men and 196 weight bias and 37–8 body dysmorphic disorder (BDD) 38, 192, 199 body image 273–8 improving 117–18 negative 104, 191–2, 217 quiz 204–5 Body Mass Index (BMI) 22–3, 32, 33–4 ‘body positivity’ movement 273–4 body shapes 17 bone mass, reduced 36 boredom 67–9 Brandolini, Alberto 13 Bratman, Steven 99–100 bread ‘bad’ food 261 white 126 wholewheat 129 British diet, typical 145 bulimia 32, 168 caffeine 210 calories counting 3, 31, 36 empty 88–9 ‘low-calorie’ food 90–1 camps, weight-loss 39 cancer bloggers and 8 chronic inflammation and 216 pesticides and 262 scares 140–2 sugar and 148 carbohydrates 69, 70, 71, 261 carbphobia 142–7, 148 cardio exercise 192, 194–5 CBT (cognitive behavioural therapy) 222 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) 208 cheat meals 84–6 cheese 146, 261 chemicals 132 chemotherapy 89, 142 ‘chewing’ diet 3 childhood close family and 226 epilepsy and 142 food 63, 244–5 food as a reward 93 and food language 257–8 free school meals 234 overweight 27 school weight-loss programmes 27–8 socio-economic factors 231–4, 236–9 Chinese medicine 14–15 cholesterol 29, 45, 145 Christmas dinner 62, 245 circadian rhythm 210 clean eating 78–80, 112, 155 cleansing 82–4, 104 clock changes, and sleep 212 clock, internal body 210 cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) 222 cold, common 53, 215 colonialism 135 comfort food 53, 61, 62–5, 65 common humanity 276 conditions, chronic 214 confirmation bias 270 control, food and 108 convenience foods 64–5 coping mechanisms 72, 83, 109, 218, 238 coping skills 219 cortisol (hormone) and insulin 216 levels of 56–7, 58–9, 61, 191, 212, 225 production of 36, 54, 55 counselling 113 cravings, food 61 ‘cult’, diet and 5–8, 11–14 dairy products 125, 127, 141, 146 death, premature 22, 24, 223 dementia 185 depression 70–1, 153–4, 168–70, 186–9, 192 detoxing 82–4, 137 diabetes, type 2 exercise and 184 and fearmongering 262 metabolic syndrome and 38 obesity and 24, 28 reversing 143 stress and 216 studies on 29 Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) 100 diet books 3, 82, 123 culture 12, 17–20, 128 history of 2–5 industry 24–5 leaders 10 mentality 245 Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories (Peters) 3 dietary guidelines, UK 145 dieting 112–13 dieting theology 8–9 dietitians 119 disability 171, 190, 272 discrimination 37, 42–3, 217 disgust 79 documentaries, food 172–5 dopamine 68, 185 DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) 100 dysmorphia 38, 168, 192, 199 ‘earn’ your food 92–3 eating behaviours 39, 154–6 eating disorders 99–121 and body image 192 HAES® approach 45 and mass media 163 risk of 32 and social media 154–6 weight stigma and 38, 39 education level of 233–4 nutritional 114–15 emotional eating 51–74, 249–52 distraction 251–2 identifying 52, 250–1 quiz 73 weight stigma and 39 emotions, social pressure and 11–12 employment 234–5 endorphins 189, 198 energy-dense food 57, 85 energy intake 95 epilepsy 142 ethnic minority groups 217 eustress 218–19 exercise 179–86 addiction 196–200 attitudes toward 271–3 benefits of 183–6 lack of 222 quiz 203 stress and 220 Facebook 11, 152, 155, 159, 162 fad diet 3 failure, diet 26–7, 32 fasting 6, 39 fat-burning 94–5 ‘fat’ terminology 41 fatphobia 43 fats, unsaturated 146 fear of missing out (FOMO) 153–4 fearmongering 123–48, 260–4 language 172 orthorexia and 111 quiz 149 feminism 248 fight-or-flight response 55–6, 212, 213 fitness environment 194–6 fitspo 180–3, 200–2 5 A Day (fruit and vegetables) 33 fizzy drinks 28 Fletcher, Horace 3 FOMO (fear of missing out) 153–4 food, as identity 5–8 food poisoning 125 Food Standards Agency, UK (FSA) 91 food traditions 4 ‘forbidden’ foods 60, 79, 245 Foresight obesity model 35 free school meals 234 freedom to choose 4–5 frozen foods 124 fuel poverty 236 fullness 46–7, 249 gastrointestinal symptoms 217 ghrelin (hormone) 47, 54, 56, 61, 211 Gibson, Belle 8 glucose 58–9 gluten 14, 101, 104, 123, 139 Gluten Lie, The (Levinovitz) 14 good/healthy, bad/unhealthy 89–91, 128, 141, 255 Goop brand 135–6 GP surgeries 229 Graham, Sylvester 15 green spaces 236–7 guilt 115, 197, 198–9, 250 guilt-free food 86–7 guilty pleasure 87 HAES® (Health At Every Size) 44–8 ‘hangry’ (hungry-angry) 66–7 happiness 52–3, 69–74 Health At Every Size (HAES®) 44–8 health, population 208–9 health-promoting behaviours improvements in 45 lifestyle and 238 messages about 41, 244 and social media 154 types of 33–4 health scares 111–12, 140–2 healthcare systems 228–31 Australian 230–1 US 230 and weight bias 37–8 healthism 17 healthy movement 271–3 heart attacks 212, 215 heart disease exercise and 184 and friends 225 metabolic syndrome and 38 obesity and 24 risk factors 145 stress and 215–16 HFSS (High Fat, Sugar and Salt foods) 91 high stress reactivity 57 HIIT (high-intensity interval training) 180 homophobia 42, 43 hormones 36, 47, 54–7, 61, 69 hospital care 229–30 housing 236 HPA (hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal) axis 55, 56, 61, 213, 215 humanity, common 276 hunger diet culture and 19, 30, 31–2 emotional 249 exercise and 183–4 hormones 47 signals 46–7 sleep and 211 hypertension 24 hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis 55, 56, 61, 213, 215 income, levels of 233–4, 237–9 indulgence foods 64 inflammatory response 214–15, 216 insomnia, fatal familial 209 Instagram ‘clean eating’ and 155–6 and fitness 181, 182 food and 113, 116 mental health and 153, 161, 162 social comparison and 160 users of 152 insulin (hormone) cortisol and 216 definition 55 glucose and 58–9 release of 70, 143 sensitivity 33 Internet access 151 intuitive eating 46–7, 244–8 Intuitive Eating (Tribole and Resch) 247 iPhones 265, 266 isolation, social 223 junk food 91–2 Just Eat It (Thomas) 247 ketogenic diet 16, 142–3 Kraut, Robert 152 language, to describe food 75–97, 96–7, 254–8 LCHF (low-carb high-fat) diets see low-carb diet leptin (hormone) cortisol and 56 food cravings and 61 hunger levels and 47, 54, 211 stress and 58 Levinovitz, Alan, The Gluten Lie 14 LGBTQ+ community 42, 161, 217, 248 life expectancy 232 lifestyle changes 33 diseases 40 liposuction 29 loneliness 61–5, 223 quiz 227–8 Love Island 108 low-carb diet books 3, 82 carbphobia 142–7 myths and 70 natural foods and 123–4, 127, 128 and nostalgia 133 ‘low-fat’ food 81, 90–1 maca (superfood powder) 134 magazines 166, 177, 182, 267 Magic Pill,The (documentary) 173, 174 malnutrition 43 matcha (superfood) 134–5 media literacy training 269 media, mass 162–71, 267–71 advertising in 91, 165–6, 169 blamed for eating disorders 109 body image and 18 and body image quiz 177 fearmongering in 148 positives about 170–1 medical care 228–31 Mediterranean style diet 71, 146 melatonin 210 men, and media pressure 167–8 menopause, post 185 mental health 186–96 mental healthcare 229 metabolic syndrome 38–9 metabolism 30, 32, 57, 95 metaphors, food 77 milk 125, 127, 141, 146 mindful eating 252–4 mindfulness 252, 276 misinformation 13–14, 111, 114, 171–5 money, and socio-economic factors 237–9 morality ‘clean’/‘dirty’ foods 78–9 ‘fat’ and 9 food language and 254–5, 258 good/bad foods 13 of health 109 mortality 24, 28, 33 motivation 191 social and cognitive 12–13 muscle dysmorphia 38, 168 National Health Service (NHS) 228–30 National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) 41 natural food 81 natural vs artificial 127–31, 147 nature, being around 187, 190–1 Neff, Dr Kristin 275 negative associations, with food 76, 86, 97 Netflix 148, 171–5 neuropeptide Y (hormone) 54, 56 NHS (National Health Service) 228–30, 261, 262 nocebo effect 138–40, 148 non-REM sleep 209, 212 noradrenaline (hormone) 54, 55, 56–7 North–South divide 232 nostalgic foods 63, 132–6, 148 nutrient-dense foods 70–1, 90 nutrient-poor foods 88–9 nutrition 19–20 importance of 279 nutritionists 119 obesity cost of 43 levels 21–4 ‘Obesity causes cancer’ campaign 42 paradox 24 objectification theory 193–4 obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) 106 organic products 129 orthorexia nervosa 99–121, 258–60 and anorexia 105–7 case studies 104–5 causes 107–13 definition 99–100 diagnostic criteria 101–4 quiz 120–1 risk factors 121 symptoms of 100 treatment 113–19 osteoarthritis 28 osteoporosis 36, 185 overcrowding 236 overexercise 196–200 oxytocin (hormone) 225 paleo diet 15, 16 panic disorder 188 pasteurisation 125 perfectionism 110–11 pesticides 129, 262 Peters, Dr Lulu Hunt, Diet & Health: With Key to the Calories 3 pets, and stress 220 physical activity 39, 45, 95 placebo effect 139 pro-anorexia websites/forums 155 processed food 124–7, 147 protein 58, 69–70 pseudoscience, power of 8–17 PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) 188 public health policies 40–1 purging 39 racism 6, 43, 217 randomised control trials (RCTs) 143 raw foodists 6 real food 81–2 religion, food and 6–8, 83–4 REM (rapid eye movement) 209, 211 respiratory problems 236, 237 rest, importance of 273 restrained eaters 59, 101 ‘revenge body’ 110 running, and depression 187–8 SAM (sympathetic-adrenal medullary) system 55–6, 213, 215 saturated fat 143, 144, 145–6, 147 scientific journals 27 scientific literature 29, 53 self-acceptance 117, 117–18 self-care 48, 119, 275 self-compassion 117, 275–8 self-esteem and exercise 189–90 increased 45 low 104, 109–10, 278 and social media 156–60, 162 self-kindness 276 serotonin (hormone) 69, 71 set point 30 shakes, meal-replacement 3–4 shame 38, 43, 250 slavery 15 sleep 209–13 and alcohol 211 apnoea 28 deprivation 47, 211, 212 and food 210–11 non-REM sleep 209, 212 quiz 213 REM 209, 211 smoking 33, 216 social comparison 156–60 social/cultural pressure 11–12, 16 social factors, stress and 222–6 social media 151–62 bloggers 80, 92, 112, 112–13, 156 ‘cleanse’ 116 detox from 264–7 fearmongering on 148 misinformation in 14 positives 160–2 wellness and 7–8, 10, 11 social pressure 38, 108–9, 109–10 social relationships 222–4 socio-economic factors 40, 228, 231–9 sociocultural theory 192 sport 190, 191 statistics, diet failure 26–7 stigma, weight 37–40, 42–3, 60, 217 stress 53–61, 213–22 acute 56 and alcohol 216 chronic 36, 56, 60, 61, 213–14 distraction from 219 and exercise 190 hormones 36, 54, 214–15, 217, 225 money and 237–9 positive 218–19 quiz 221 work-related 215–16 strokes 215–16 sugar and fearmongering 147–8, 262 and slavery 15 and toxicity 136, 138, 148 superfoods 83, 128, 134–5 supplements 128, 188 surroundings, health and 236–7 sweet foods 58 sympathetic-adrenal medullary (SAM) system 55–6, 213, 215 teenagers, and media advertising 165–6 television commercials 18, 19, 91 watching 18, 163, 166–7, 169 tinned foods 124 toxicity 136–8 sugar and 136, 138, 148 Transport for London 237 triglycerides 29, 184 tryptophan (amino acid) 69–70 Tumblr 161 Twitter 152, 153, 162 type 2 diabetes exercise and 184 and fearmongering 262 metabolic syndrome and 38 obesity and 24, 28 reversing 143 unemployment 234–5 unsaturated fats 146 vaccination 133 veganism 10, 102, 127 vegetables, and fruit 33 vitamin D 187–8 water 125 weight bias 37–8, 42 quiz 50 weight-focused approach 36 weight-inclusive programme 45 weight-lifting 192, 195, 199, 272 weight-loss programmes claims by 34–5 in schools 27–8 vs weight-inclusive programme 45 workplace 28 weight-loss studies 27 weight-normative approach 21–2, 35, 44–8 weight, social-economic factors and 240–1 wellness brands 92, 126 as a ‘cult’ 7, 12, 128 fearmongering and 123 and leaders 9, 10 ‘Only eat foods you can pronounce’ 131–2, 134, 147 price tags 78–9, 102 and social media 7–8, 10, 11 What the Health (documentary) 172, 174 Women’s Health Initiative (US) 26 World Health Organization (WHO) 1, 2, 208 yo-yo dieting 36–7 yoga 190, 195, 272 ‘You are what you eat’ 14–15, 16, 81–2, 94 YouTube 158 About Anima Anima is an illustrated non-fiction lifestyle imprint from Head of Zeus.

I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That
by Ben Goldacre
Published 22 Oct 2014

In two of them, the consent form contained a statement outlining various gastrointestinal side effects, and in these centres there was a sixfold increase in the number of people reporting such symptoms, and many more people dropping out of the trial, compared with the one centre that did not list such side effects on the form. This is the amazing world of the nocebo effect, the evil twin of the placebo effect, where negative expectations can induce unpleasant symptoms in the absence of a physical cause. Sadly, though, it doesn’t help homeopaths: in 2003 Professor Edzard Ernst conducted a systematic review of every single homeopathy trial that reported side effects. This found, in total, fifty episodes of side effects in patients treated with placebo and sixty-three in patients treated with homeopathically diluted remedies, with no statistically significant difference in the rates of side effects between the two groups.

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This found, in total, fifty episodes of side effects in patients treated with placebo and sixty-three in patients treated with homeopathically diluted remedies, with no statistically significant difference in the rates of side effects between the two groups. Quacks like to present themselves as holistic, but in reality this research into the placebo effect and the nocebo effect suggests quite the opposite. The world of the homeopath is reductionist, one-dimensional, and built on the power of the pill: it cannot accommodate the fascinating reality of connections between mind and body, which have been revealed in these experiments, and many more.

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Characters from this community who wonder why people keep writing about them should look at their libel cases and their awesomely bad behaviour under fire. You are a comedy factory. Don’t go changing. Next: the real story of how the world works is much weirder than anything a quack can make up. The placebo effect is maddening, the nocebo effect more so, but the research on how we make decisions, and are misled by heuristics and mental shortcuts, is the wildest of all. Knowing about these belief-hacks gives you thrills, and power. Pharmaceutical companies can behave dismally. Most important, they still won’t publish all the results of all the clinical trials conducted on humans.

Dry Humping: A Guide to Dating, Relating, and Hooking Up Without the Booze
by Tawny Lara
Published 19 Sep 2023

EDIBLE APHRODISIACS Eating sensual foods with someone that you’re into can be a fun, sexy experience—and might even promote blood flow to the genitals (the opposite of what overconsuming alcohol does) by relaxing blood vessels. The feeling of being turned on when you indulge in famously sexy foods is probably at least partly attributable to the placebo effect, but who cares? If a round of oysters followed by chocolate-covered strawberries gets you in the mood without alcohol, order up! The point here is that you’re building a genuine connection with someone. If sparks don’t fly, at least you’re now aware of it instead of getting drunk and letting the night take a different turn.

…

As the show progresses, we see that his character struggles with social anxiety, which manifests as selective mutism. As he learns to address his anxiety directly, he stops feeling the need to self-medicate with alcohol. There’s a scene in a later season where Raj discovers that, while feeling confident talking to a woman, he’s actually drinking nonalcoholic beer. The placebo effect worked on him, activating the intrinsic courage he had all along. My journey has been similar to Raj’s, in that I used alcohol as a shortcut to feeling confident in an area I felt deeply insecure about: relationships. Receiving professional help got me a mental health diagnosis, correct medication, and tools for communication.

The Patient Will See You Now: The Future of Medicine Is in Your Hands
by Eric Topol
Published 6 Jan 2015

A buzzword these days for unnecessary or ineffective medical procedures or care is “low value.”33,35–39 A recent example is arthroscopic (performed via a scope to limit the size of incision) knee surgery known as “partial meniscectomy”—the most common operation in the United States, with over seven hundred thousand performed each year with direct medical costs of $4 billion.40 In a randomized trial conducted by Canadian researchers, patients with a torn meniscus were randomized to arthroscopic partial meniscectomy or a sham operation, such that the patient or researchers collecting the data for the patients did not know which had been performed.40 There was no difference in outcomes, emphasizing the profound placebo effect of surgery itself. What makes the trial truly notable is the rarity of such experimental rigor in testing surgeries. Although using sham controls for comparison with actual procedures is the best way to distinguish the placebo effect, surgeons and patients are typically quite reluctant to participate in such a trial design. For this reason, there may well be many operations and procedures that are ineffective, but there have not been any rigorous trials putting them to the test.

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Let’s consider a patient with depression, a condition for which mobile apps are already starting to make a difference.95b A medication has been prescribed and there is a question as to whether it is working. The patient reports feeling subjectively better, but all of the objective indices—tone and inflection of voice, frequency of communication, activity and movement, breathing pattern, facial expression, vital signs, HRV and GSR—show no sign of improvement whatsoever. Does this diagnose a placebo effect of the medication? The patient looks at the integrated data and notes a dissociation of symptoms and the metrics. A whole new discussion can ensue as to whether a medication is necessary, whether it’s really working, and the potential to explore other alternative nonmedical treatments. Or another patient with a history of frequent asthma attacks is now using the lung smartphone add-appter, which gathers environmental exposures that include pollen count and air quality, ambient temperature and humidity, along with activity, vital signs, lung function (forced expiratory volume in one second via the microphone), chest movement, and breathing pattern.

…

Osborne, Joshua, 96–97 Otoscope, smartphone, 122 Outpatient procedures, 183–186 Outsourcing health care, 147–149 Ovarian cancer, 55(quote), 56–57, 59, 66, 75, 110 Ownership of property, 281–282 Ozcan, Aydogan, 262 Pa, Roy, 197–198 Page, Larry, 198 Pandora, 243 Panoramic GIS view, 81–82 Paper-based analytic devices, 262, 269 Paracelsus, 279–280 Parker, Randy, 168 Parkinson, Jay, 174 Patents, gene, 72–76 Paternalism, Age of, 20 Paternalism, medical American Medical Association, 21–26 data access and ownership, 125–127, 129 disrespect for patients, 29–31 dissemination of knowledge through printing, 13–14 doctor’s orders, 27–28 FDA quashing consumer genome testing, 64–71 historical path of, 17–21, 49–54 modern technology transforming health care, 275–277 patient access to radiation exposure data, 115 patient access to test results, 107–108 professional guidelines for physicians, 31–32 signs of the persistence of, 26–34 Pathway Genomics, 68–69 Patient, Heal Thyself (Veatch), 18, 29–30 Patient records, 4 Patient-generated data, 135–136 Patients in waiting, 91 PatientsLikeMe, 10–11, 173, 203, 211–212 Pentland, Alex “Sandy,” 79(quote) Percival, Thomas, 20 Personal Genome Project (PGP), 199 Personal Genome Service (PGS), 63–71 Phablet, 40 Pharmacists and pharmaceuticals clinical trial data, 213–216 prescription testosterone gels, 144 telemonitoring, 162 Theranos blood test process, 106–107 waste, 144–145 Pharmacogenomics, 100–101, 102(table), 134 Phenlyketonuria (PKU), 91–92 Phenome, 81–83 Phlebotomy, 106 Physicals, annual, 146–147 Physics of the Future (Kaku), 119 Physiome, 81–83 Pickrell, Joe, 70–71 PillPack, 206 Placebo effect, 142–144 Polygenic diseases, 93–94 Ponemon Institute, 225 Portable Legal Consent, 199–200 Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), 251–252 Practice Fusion, 138 Prakash, Manu, 262–263 Predictive analysis artificial intelligence and machine learning, 244–246 at the individual level, 242–246 at the population level, 240–242 diagnosis, misdiagnosis and disease prevention, 247–253 molecular stethoscope and machine learning, 253–256 Pregnancy and childbirth costs associated with, 149 DNA data, 254 medical GIS in the developing world, 269 smartphone use in the developing world, 263 ultrasound use, 275–276 Premature babies, 252–253 Prenatal genomic screening, 89–91 Prevention of disease artificial intelligence and machine learning, 244–246 diagnosis, misdiagnosis and prevention through predictive analysis, 247–253 dream and possibility of, 238–239 examples of preventable diseases, 254(table) GIS data used for, 93–96 predictive analysis, 240–242 the individual and the Internet of Medical Things, 246–247 Preventive Services Task Force, US, 33 Prewomb medicine, 89–90 Price comparator websites, 153–154 Priests, 13–14, 17–18, 50 Printing press, 13–14, 37–39, 39(fig.), 40–41, 41(fig.), 45–47, 46(fig.), 47–49, 285 The Printing Press as an Agent of Change (Eisenstein), 38–42, 47–49 Privacy concerns, 219–235 Privacy Rights Clearinghouse, 228–229 Project Artemis, 252 Project Masiluleke (South Africa), 261–262 Pronovost, Peter, 186 Prostate cancer screening, 118 Protective alleles, 102 Protein biology, 86 Proteome, 81–82, 86 Proteus, 133–134 Proton beam radiation, 146 Qualcomm, 286 Quality in healthcare, 156–157 QuantuMDs, 264, 265(fig.)

The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph From the Frontiers of Brain Science
by Norman Doidge
Published 15 Mar 2007

Men wounded on the battlefield often don’t feel pain and keep fighting; it’s as if the brain closes the “gate,” to keep the embattled soldier’s attention riveted on how to get out of harm’s way. Only when he is safe are the pain signals allowed to pass to the brain. Physicians have long known that a patient who expects to get pain relief from a pill often does, even though it is a placebo containing no medication. fMRI brain scans show that during the placebo effect the brain turns down its own pain-responsive regions. When a mother soothes her hurt child, by stroking and talking sweetly to her, she is helping the child’s brain turn down the volume on its pain. How much pain we feel is determined in significant part by our brains and minds—our current mood, our past experiences of pain, our psychology, and how serious we think our injury is.

…

Neither he nor the Secret Service, which slammed him roughly into his car to protect him, knew he had been shot. Reagan said in a CBS documentary, “I had never been shot before, except in the movies. Then you always act as though it hurts. Now I know that does not always happen.” Cited ibid., 1999. brain scans show that during the placebo effect the brain turns down its own pain-responsive regions: T. D. Wager, J. K. Rilling, E. E. Smith, A. Sokolik, K. L. Casey, R. J. Davidson, S. M. Kosslyn, R. M. Rose, and J. D. Cohen. 2004. Placebo-induced changes in fMRI in the anticipation and experience of pain. Science, 303(5661): 1162–67. the neurons in our pain system are far more plastic: R.

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nonverbal communication North Korea Nottebohm, Fernando nucleus basalis obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) anxiety in brain components involved in brain lock theory of brain scans of causes of checking compulsions in emotional trigger of and infections magical beliefs in mistake feeling in obsessional thoughts in resistance to sex and aggression issues in typical compulsive acts in typical obsessions in obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), treatments of behavior therapy cognitive therapy form vs. content in frontal lobotomy medications psychoanalysis refocusing on pleasurable activity relabeling in use-it-or-lose-it principle in occipital lobes O’Connell, Redmond Olds, James olfactory bulb On Aphasia (Freud) On Love (Stendhal) operator theory orbitofrontal system orienting response oxytocin Pacheco, Alex Paglia, Camille pain of battlefield injuries body image and brain maps and chronic congenital absence of emotional endorphins as blocking gate control theory of guarding and hypersensitivity to in India learned mirror therapy for neuronal inhibition of normal “acute” placebo effect and referred in sexual perversions treatments for visualization exercises for see also phantom limbs; phantom pain pain medication pain system complexity of motor components of Palombo, Stanley panic disorder psychoanalytic psychotherapy and paralysis: hemiplegia as mood state of phantom limbs thought translation machine for see also strokes parenting see also mothering parietal lobes Parkinson’s disease Pascual-Leone, Alvaro background of blindfold experiment of Braille reading experiments of on brain as plastic, not elastic mental practice experiment of on operator theory on plastic brain as like snowy hill, and mental-neural tracks quick vs. slow plastic change on rigidity on similar behaviors as using different circuits Paul, Ron Pavlov, Ivan Penfield, Wilder People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) perceptual learning aging and analytic vs. holistic ideological indoctrination through perfectibilité, moral problems created by peripheral nervous system perversions, see sexual perversions PET (positron emission tomography) scans phantom limbs brain maps and of Civil War soldiers as frozen mirror therapy for paralysis of serial amputations for sexual excitement and successful amputation of phantom pain absence of feedback in brain map invasion and frozen postoperative see also phantom limbs physical exercise mental practice of Piaget, Jean placebo effect plastic paradox Plato pleasure cravings vs.

The Gospel of Food: Everything You Think You Know About Food Is Wrong
by Barry Glassner
Published 15 Feb 2007

“What we think we know about nutrition is not supported by real scientific inquiry,” he told me on a subsequent occasion. Little biological evidence exists, he said, to support the claims of those who caution against particular foods. If some people are healthier for having eschewed those foods, the reason may well be psychological. “Because of the placebo effect, people feel better when they adopt certain dietary habits,” Hahn contended. When I reminded him that his views are at odds with what one hears from physicians at the American Heart Association and diet advisory panels of the U.S. government, he recommended I do a small study myself to see how much those docs are really willing to attribute to diet.41 False Prophets 25 “You have to ask the right question,” said Hahn.

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Both companies have implored people to pay extra for something they can do without. The McDonald’s customer at least got what was promised. The functional-foods consumer gets only a promise. People who feel more mentally adept after drinking fortified water are probably responding 46 The Gospel of Food either to the sugar in the product or to the placebo effect (having been told they will feel revived, they do). Even in the case of products whose additives have a legitimate scientific basis, the promised benefits can prove illusory. Gold Circle Farms promises better vision, brain function, and cardiovascular health to those who buy its eggs enriched with DHA omega-3, a fatty acid that research has found to be beneficial for protecting against a range of diseases.

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French perceptions of, 42 “expectancy confirmation,” xii federal law and, 38 strawberry flavors, 38 vanilla vs. vanillin, 37–38 Nestle, Marion, 44, 207 New Products Magazine, 86 New York Times food critics and writers, 92, 94–95, 98, 105, 106, 121, 124, 246n. 6 “$25 and Under” column, 131 Nguyen, Thi, 119–20, 122–23, 132 Nicholson, Asenath, 4 Nieporent, Drew, 100–103 Nobu restaurant, 100 North Pond restaurant, 108, 111, 114 Nurses Health Study, 27, 29–30 critiques of, 18 misleading fi ndings, 19–20 obesity and heart disease fi ndings, 194–95 nutrients crucial to human health, 15 demonized, 11, 15, 17 dietary fat as containing crucial, 14, 15 enjoyment of food and absorption of, 1–2 oat-bran, 52–53, 209 “oat-bran syndrome,” 53 obesity, 12, 17, 174–99 adenovirus-36 and, 188–89 American factors in obesity, 12, 17 antismoking campaigns and, 180, 188 Index 281 bias against, 262n. 54 binge eating and, 186–87, 199 bottle-feeding and, 181–82 childhood, 180–81, 257n. 16 church-goers and, 187–88 diets and, 186–87, 195–97, 261n. 49 dinner menu, 1950s to 1970s, 185 diseases related to, 192–95 ethnic heritage and, 179 fast-food and, 174–75, 182–84, 254n. 2 fiscal model (excess calories, insufficient exercise), 175–76, 177–78, 190, 197, 255n. 3 food insecurity and, 198–99, 263n. 56 genetic factors, 177, 178, 179, 196 group meals, 188, 259n. 32 health risks questioned, 189–92 law of unintended consequences and, 179–82 life expectancy and, 190–91, 260n. 40, 261n. 47, 262n. 51 measuring, “threshold effect,” 178 Mike Huckabee and, 185 nondietary factors, 177, 179–82, 255n. 7 paradox of greater food intake, 185–86 people’s misreporting of what they eat, 21, 255n. 7 set point theory, 197–98 social pressure to be thin, 197–99 socio-economic class, race, and, 179–80, 182–83, 196–97, 263n. 55 stress and, 180 tallness vs., 189, 259n. 24 types of food and, 176–79, 255n. 3 wealthier Americans and lower rate, 196–97, 263n. 55 weight loss and food marketing, 210–11 working mothers blamed, 181, 182, 257n. 16 Obesity Myth, The (Campos), 193 Oldways Preservation Trust, 6–8 olive oil and olives, 2, 209 Oliver, Jamie, 212 Omnivore’s Dilemma (Pollan), 70 O’Naturals, 168–71 customer profi le, 170 employees, 168 Ono restaurant, 101 OpenTable Inc., 97, 247n. 10 organic foods Cascadian Farm, 71–73 “expectancy confirmation,” xii farm cooperatives and, 64–65 food industry and, 62–63, 71–75, 245n. 15 health and environmental benefits, 64–65, 242n. 1 “industrial organic,” 72 lunch at expo, 64–65 milk, 62, 65 nutrients vs. nonorganic, 62 rejection of irradiation, 65–68 Rodale and, 63–64 small farmers and, 70–72 TV dinners, 71–72 Organic Gardening (Rodale), 63–64 Organic Valley cooperative, 64–65, 70 Ornish, Dean, 176 Orwell, George, 156 Palms Thai restaurant, 119 Panda Express restaurants, 137–41 best-selling item, 143 training of employees, 143 Paradise Tomato Kitchens, 81–83 pasta, dried vs. fresh, 83 282 Index Pastinelli, Madeleine, 128 Paz, Octavio, 128–29 peanuts, 211 peas, frozen vs. fresh, 83 Pepsico Aquafina water, 45 Mother’s Toasted Oat Bran Cereal, 48 Propel Fitness Water, 48 perfectionism, 200 food snobs and, 202–5 nutritional imperialists and, 201, 202 Per Se restaurant, 94–95, 109, 115 pesticides, 65 Peters, Lulu Hunt, 176 Petrini, Carlo, 220 Philip Morris, 48 Phillips Barbecue, 124 Phrack magazine, 148 Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (PCRM), 207 anti-Atkins Web site, 214 on beef, 213 studies sponsored by, 214 pineapple, 80–81 Pirate’s Booty, 53 pizza hunger-relief organizations and, 201 as perfect food, 201 Pizza Hut, 141, 142 placebo effect, 24 fortified water and, 46 pleasure in food absorption of nutrients and, 1–2 American attitude vs., 3 Americans sacrificing of, 197–98 bò 7 món, 228 gospel of naught vs., 4 as important for health, 1–3 potato and, 5–6 self-denial of, effects, 3–6 study on food attitudes and, 2–3 Plotkin, Mark, 64 Pochapin, Cheryl, 126 Poe, Tracy, 84–85 Pollan, Michael, 70–72, 74 countercuisine, 72 Pork Board, 32 Post, Charles W., 43 potato as anti-depressive, 4–5 contradictory opinions and, 7–8 as ethnic slur on Irish, 226 health risks of, perceived, 4 marketing health benefits, 211 nutritional and health benefits, 4–5, 6 pleasures of eating, 5–6 specialist farmers for, 110 Yukon gold, 6 Potatoes Not Prozac, 4–5 Powles, John, 21 Powter, Susan, 176 Probyn, Elsbeth, 43, 148 processed and frozen foods convenience of, 61, 84–87 feminism and, 85 history, 84–86 nutrients and, 83 organic TV dinners, 71–72 pineapple wedges breakthrough, 80–81 Procter & Gamble, 79 Propel Fitness Water, 48 Public Citizen, 67 Puck, Wolfgang, 97–99, 115, 116, 156 Putnam, Robert, 121 Putney Swope (fi lm), 43 Index 283 Quaker Oats, 52–53 Quorn, 68–70 R & D operations, 77–81 Burger King, 34–35, 146–47 Flavurence Corporation, 37–40 fresh pineapple wedges, 80–81 Rain restaurant, 41 Ravnskov, Uffe, 22 Reichl, Ruth, 89–90, 91, 92, 93, 112–13, 217, 246n. 5 Renaud, Serge, 2 Restaurant, The (TV show), 103–6, 247n. 21 restaurants.

SEDATED: How Modern Capitalism Created Our Mental Health Crisis
by James. Davies
Published 15 Nov 2021

But even these very minor differences between placebos and antidepressants, we argued, could potentially be explained away, since most people experience side effects when taking an antidepressant (unlike when taking a placebo). This helps them work out during a clinical trial that they are on the antidepressant, which boosts their expectation of recovery and in turn the placebo effect. In short, side effects boost placebo effects, accounting for why an antidepressant may appear slightly more effective than a placebo when the two are compared in the treatment of severe depression. 36 Pigott, H. E., et al. (2010), ‘Efficacy and effectiveness of antidepressants: current status of research’, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics 79:267–79. 37 Longden, E., et al. (2018), ‘Assessing the Impact and Effectiveness of Hearing Voices Network Self-Help Groups’, Community Mental Health Journal 54:184–188. 38 Calton, Tim, et al. (2008), ‘A Systematic Review of the Soteria Paradigm for the Treatment of People Diagnosed With Schizophrenia’, Schizophrenia Bulletin 34 (1):181–92. 39 Open Dialogue approaches are now being piloted in a few NHS sites in the UK, while the Hearing Voices network in particular is growing in influence and impact. 40 Kendrick, T. (2015), ‘Long-term antidepressant treatment: Time for a review?’

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This fear is due to certain misleading myths about antidepressants and depression that have been exported from psychiatry to primary care over the last three decades. These myths include the false and unsubstantiated idea that major depression is often a chronic (lifelong) condition requiring continuous treatment, and that any improvement while on the drugs is mostly due to the drugs themselves rather than to other factors (such as situational change, placebo effects, or the natural course of depression coming to an end). For those subscribing to these myths, stopping antidepressants is often advised against, because, as the doctors put it, ‘Why disturb the patient’s equilibrium’?41 If the above myths help propel unnecessary long-term antidepressant consumption, they nevertheless pale in comparison to the next driving factor.

The Price of Everything: And the Hidden Logic of Value
by Eduardo Porter
Published 4 Jan 2011

Moved by any number of unacknowledged biases, they are easy prey to manipulative devices deployed by those who want to sell them things. Prices help us understand these cognitive lacunae. They provide a road map of people’s psychological quirks, of their fears, their unacknowledged constraints. Prices—how they are set, how people react to them—can tell us who people really are. Most of us have heard of the placebo effect—in which a pill with no therapeutic properties relieves a real ailment by making us believe that we are being cured, setting in motion some inner psychological process. A few years ago, psychologist Dan Ariely from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and some colleagues performed an experiment that uncovered an interesting variant.

…

Meckling, “The Nature of Man,” Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Vol. 7, No. 2, Summer 1994, pp. 4-19. The data on wages and gas prices was drawn from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Energy Information Administration. Data on gas mileage was drawn from the Environmental Protection Agency’s 1974 Gas Mileage Guide for Car Buyers. 15-22 The Price of Things: The experiment on placebo effects is found in Dan Ariely, Baba Shiv, Ziv Carmon, and Rebecca Waber, “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” Journal of the American Medical Association , Letters, Vol. 299, No. 9, 2008, pp. 1016-1017. The relation between lap-dancer tips and menstrual cycles is drawn from Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur, and Brent Jordan, “Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?

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happiness in restaurants in service industries in New York Sports Club New York Times New York Times Magazine New Zealand Nine Inch Nails 99 Cents Only chain of stores Nixon, Richard Nordhaus, William Norway Nu au Plateau de Sculpteur (Picasso) Obama, Barack campaign spending of health care and Occupational Safety and Health Administration O’Connor, Sandra Day oil Olympics (1988) Oneida community opera companies “Orange Juice and Weather,” Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) overweight Owen, Robert Page, Talbot Papua New Guinea Paraguay Paris Parliament, British Pascal, Blaise patents patriarchy PC World Pelé Pengajian Pennsylvania, University of pensions People’s Liberation Army Perú Pew Global Attitudes Project Pew Project on the Internet and American Life Pew Research Center pharmaceutical industry photography Picasso, Pablo Piso Firme (Firm Floor) Pitt, William Pitt’s Pictures placebo effect pneumococcal disease politics culture and pollution air polygamy pop stars population replacement rate of Portugal Pound, Ezra precautionary principle price discrimination prices: history of misfiring of overview of rule of taming of Prince, Charles Princeton University printers printing, in Great Britain Prisco, Giulio productivity agricultural slavery and wages and property intellectual Prospect Theory Protestant Reformation Protestants public goods publishing Puerto Rico Punjab Pythagoras quality-adjusted life year (QALY) Quiverfull radio Radiohead Rapa Nui rationality Rawls, John Reagan, Ronald recession reciprocity Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) record labels regulation of banking Reinhart, Carmen religion, see faith; specific religions Renaissance reproduction male vs. female investment in Residential Mortgage-Backed Securities (RMBS) resources allocation of free restaurants Reznor, Trent Ricardo, David Ricos También Lloran, Los (telenovela) risks, risk taking Roach, Stephen Rogoff, Kenneth Rome, classical Roosevelt, Franklin D.

We Are Electric: Inside the 200-Year Hunt for Our Body's Bioelectric Code, and What the Future Holds
by Sally Adee
Published 27 Feb 2023

To the critics, here was proof that the people hawking the benefits of electrical brain stimulation today had no more science behind them than the charlatans selling electric penis belts in the 1870s. A consensus emerged that tDCS was, if not outright quackery, certainly in the same postcode. Were they right? Had I become the latest victim of the placebo effect? Had I fallen for reheated, 200-year-old snake oil polished to a silicon shine? I had started to wonder about this myself. Still mesmerized by the glow of that first tDCS nirvana, I had quickly set out to sample the cranial delights offered at other labs. I found that the experimental psychology department at Oxford was investigating tDCS’s potential role in boosting mathematical ability.

…

Robinson began to worry that the experiments had been unethical. “They just did not have sufficient grounds for doing it.” How could a scientist make any claims for an intervention when there was no one in the study who was not receiving the treatment, as was the case for this safety trial, by design? How could they account for the placebo effect? There was no way to check the volunteers’ self-reported improvements against spinal neurite growth—it’s not like you could cut them up for dissection. The comparison groups Shapiro and Borgens used were case studies from other experiments unrelated to theirs. Sure, none of the ten subjects were harmed, but “those experiments were unethical even if they didn’t harm anyone,” Robinson insists.

…

“Okay, now we’re going to see if we can make this as realistic as possible,” he said, fiddling with the box behind me—he meant he was going to try to approximate the control and sham condition on a clinical trial. That would require me having no idea whether or not the electricity was on, so that I wouldn’t get messed around by the placebo effect. “I’m going to come in a bunch of times, but I’m not going to tell you when I turn the electricity on.” This wouldn’t have passed a review, but then I wasn’t actually participating in a clinical trial. This was an anecdote, and I was a tourist. He left, and the quiet dunes and targets dissolved.

Statistics in a Nutshell
by Sarah Boslaugh
Published 10 Nov 2012

Third, there is no way the researchers can be sure that some other confounding variable was not responsible for the result because there was no experimental control in the overall process; for example, there could be some physiological response to drinking water at noon (in this paradigm) that increases intelligence levels in the afternoon. Finally, participants could be experiencing the placebo effect by which they expect that having taken the drug, their performance will improve. This is a well-known phenomenon in psychology and requires the creation of an additional control group to be tested under similar circumstances but with an inert rather than active substance being administered. There are numerous such objections that could be made to the design as it stands, but fortunately, there are well-defined ways in which the design can be strengthened by using experimental controls.

…

When multiple tests are performed, the experiment-wise Type I error rate is almost certainly higher than the p-value for a single experiment. (The exception is if all the tests are completely independent.) Several statistical procedures have been established to adjust p-values for multiple testing, including the Greenhouse-Geisser correction and the Bonferroni correction. Blinding You might have heard of the so-called placebo effect, in which participants in an experiment who have been allocated to a control group appear to exhibit some of the effects of the treatment. This effect arises from many sources, including an expectancy effect (because in drug trials, for example, the experimental substance and its known effects and risks would be disclosed to participants) as well as bias introduced by the behavior of the treatment allocators or response gatherers in an experiment.

…

For example, could the participants or investigators have introduced some bias by having knowledge of the treatment or control conditions in an experiment? Controls If the effect of a treatment is demonstrated in a pre-treatment or post-treatment model, are matched controls receiving a placebo within the same experimental paradigm to control for the placebo effect? A designed experiment is the best (some would say the only) way to draw causal inferences reliably from data. Quick Checklist Investigations supported by statistics follow a surprisingly standard life cycle. If you are reviewing a piece of work, try to determine what the sequence of events was during the investigation.

The Last Best Cure: My Quest to Awaken the Healing Parts of My Brain and Get Back My Body, My Joy, a Nd My Life
by Donna Jackson Nakazawa
Published 21 Feb 2013

These interpersonal interactions with a healing practitioner may in and of themselves be enough to stimulate or enhance the placebo effect to the extent that pain, anxiety, and other symptoms are, at least temporarily, blunted. I think of something I recently read—almost humorous—that simply running your fingers over money relieves chronic pain. Having a practitioner place so much emotional and physical attention on you, your story, and well-being may be a bit like smoothing your hand over a million-dollar bill. Indeed, MRIs of patients’ brains show that real acupuncture does something quite extraordinary to the placebo effect itself: placement of needles in key meridians directly stimulates the area in our brain that governs our placebo response, or the expectation of a good, pain-free outcome.

…

Second, meditation and yoga have been shown to be beneficial in terms of lowering inflammatory markers linked to virtually every disease from depression to back pain to cancer. The research on acupuncture is still emerging, with some scientists arguing that its benefits may be due in part to the placebo effect—and yet, real or placebo, people heal. Rowland-Seymour sees acupuncture transform her patients’ lives. And finally, meditation and yoga can be learned without great expense through affordable community classes and supplemented with Internet downloads or DVDs. Acupuncture is usually covered by insurance. 3.

Drunk: How We Sipped, Danced, and Stumbled Our Way to Civilization
by Edward Slingerland
Published 31 May 2021

During the experiment they displayed lower skin conductance and heart-rate increases, as well as lower self-reported anxiety levels. After the experiment they reported being more cheerful than controls. Significantly, the effects of alcohol were entirely due to the pharmacological properties of ethanol: Subjects in group #2 showed no placebo effects, either physiological or psychological. This study from the 1980s has since been bolstered by a massive literature demonstrating alcohol’s “stress-response dampening” effect.36 Mild levels of inebriation reduce our physiological and psychological response to a wide variety of stressors, both physical (loud noises, electric shocks) and social (public speaking, conversations with strangers).

…

Considering the dangers and costs involved in allowing chemical intoxication to play a role in our lives, prudence would dictate that we think about how to mitigate the risks. Entire books can and have been written about precisely this topic.83 Here, I would like to conclude this chapter with a few takeaways that emerge naturally from our discussion. Sober Bars: Tapping into the Placebo Effect Ruby Warrington, a journalist who came to view with alarm the toll that regular work-related drinking was taking on her health and mind, has organized a movement for what she calls the “sober curious,” which hosts events and retreats. She is part of a broader movement of what has been described as: a new generation of kinda-sorta temporary temperance crusaders, whose attitudes toward the hooch is somewhere between Carrie Nation’s and Carrie Bradshaw’s.

…

One way of understanding sober bars is as a method for tapping into the intoxication buzz without the toxic part. We’ve mentioned before the expectancy effect that surrounds alcohol consumption. If you drink something expecting that it is going to make you drunk, it often makes you a little drunk, even if it’s only flavored water. This is related to the well-known placebo effect in medicine; patients who are given a sugar pill and told it is a potent medicine will often see significant health improvements. More relevant to the phenomenon of sober bars, merely thinking about alcohol, by being primed with alcohol-related keywords or shown an alcohol-related ad, can make you feel and behave a bit drunk.85 So patrons of a sober bar, despite knowing they are being served virgin cocktails, are nonetheless exposed to unconscious alcohol-related cues.

Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire: A 500-Year History
by Kurt Andersen
Published 4 Sep 2017

Weil’s center and Duke University’s have formed a confederation of woo-friendly divisions of other big-league medical centers, including those at Stanford, half the Ivy League, and dozens more. Most alternative treatments and cures have failed to be scientifically confirmed. When they sometimes work to relieve pain or anxiety, the science-based people deride it as a mere placebo effect, a secular faith healing. So the believers who want a scientific imprimatur have changed tack and embraced a new, significant rebranding: Okay, fine, it’s a placebo effect—and now placebo medicine and placebo studies are a discipline. They have the imprimatur of Harvard, which started a Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. (When I first heard about it, I actually thought someone was kidding me.)

…

It’s what the author of The Secret explained about her fundamental “law of attraction”—the life-changing fantasy that definitely isn’t a fantasy, but if it is, so what: “The placebo effect is an example of the law of attraction in action. When a patient truly believes the tablet is a cure, he receives what he believes and is cured.” Maybe most of the millions of Americans who spend billions of dollars a year on homeopathic remedies for their asthma, depression, migraines, allergies, arthritis, or hypertension—six of the ten illnesses most commonly treated—do experience placebo effects and feel better. But some of them are failing to get diagnoses and take medicines that would actually treat their illnesses.

The World of Caffeine: The Science and Culture of the World's Most Popular Drug
by Bennett Alan Weinberg and Bonnie K. Bealer
Published 5 Dec 2000

There remains considerable ambiguity about many of these putative effects. For example, some researchers have found that caffeine improves mood and performance only when people are aware that they have consumed it, which if true would mean that even the most widely acknowledged results of taking the drug are simply placebo effects! However, if you have any doubt that caffeine is a drug, and a potent one, consider that a dose of only 1 gram, equivalent to about six strong cups of coffee, may produce insomnia, restlessness, ringing in the ears, confusion, tremors, irregular heartbeat, fever, photophobia, vomiting, and diarrhea.

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He concluded that it was impossible to flunk the IOC test as a result of the ordinary consumption of caffeinated beverages and that any athlete who failed to pass should be presumed to have resorted to caffeine to enhance his performance.85 Although a number of athletes have run into trouble over their urinary levels of caffeine, so far the IOC itself has disqualified only one participant on this account, an Australian pentathlon competitor in the Seoul Olympics in l988.86 Interest in caffeine’s benefits to exercise increased in the late 1970s after studies from the Human Performance Laboratory at Ball State University suggested that 200 mg of caffeine exerted a significant effect on an athlete’s endurance. Other studies have failed to confirm this conclusion, and some have suggested that the observed improvements were a consequence of a placebo effect. Determining the answer comes down to evaluating whether caffeine has ergogenic effects—that is, whether it can improve aerobic performance or the capacity of the body for physical work. The body gets the energy needed to power muscles in at least three different ways, depending on whether the energy expenditure is of short, moderate, or extended duration.

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This is difficult to explain since caffeine is a stimulant.... The unusual magnitude of the sleepiness and the rarity of this apparent association between caffeine and excessive sleepiness, even in sleep clinic patients, suggest an idiosyncratic phenomenon.32 Another strange effect, which might be called the “reverse placebo” effect, was observed by A.Goldstein in a 1964 study. Participants in his experiment were all given caffeine. Those who knew they had taken the drug were less likely to complain of wakefulness than those who were not informed whether they had taken caffeine or a placebo.33 Perhaps this could also be called the “bravado effect,” whereby people are reluctant to confess a disturbance from what is ordinarily considered a mild agent, such as caffeine.

Fantasyland
by Kurt Andersen
Published 5 Sep 2017

Weil’s center and Duke University’s have formed a confederation of woo-friendly divisions of other big-league medical centers, including those at Stanford, half the Ivy League, and dozens more. Most alternative treatments and cures have failed to be scientifically confirmed. When they sometimes work to relieve pain or anxiety, the science-based people deride it as a mere placebo effect, a secular faith healing. So the believers who want a scientific imprimatur have changed tack and embraced a new, significant rebranding: Okay, fine, it’s a placebo effect—and now placebo medicine and placebo studies are a discipline. They have the imprimatur of Harvard, which started a Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter. (When I first heard about it, I actually thought someone was kidding me.)

…

It’s what the author of The Secret explained about her fundamental “law of attraction”—the life-changing fantasy that definitely isn’t a fantasy, but if it is, so what: “The placebo effect is an example of the law of attraction in action. When a patient truly believes the tablet is a cure, he receives what he believes and is cured.” Maybe most of the millions of Americans who spend billions of dollars a year on homeopathic remedies for their asthma, depression, migraines, allergies, arthritis, or hypertension—six of the ten illnesses most commonly treated—do experience placebo effects and feel better. But some of them are failing to get diagnoses and take medicines that would actually treat their illnesses.

Confessions of a GP
by Benjamin Daniels
Published 4 Aug 2010

Alternative medicine I view alternative medicine a bit like I view prayer. I believe that both only work if you really have faith in them. They are also similar in the fact that neither can be explained by evidence or science, yet live on after thousands of years. My own personal belief is that both prayer and most alternative medicine practices only work via the placebo effect. However, as a doctor it is important that I put aside my personal reservations and accept that many of my patients believe in non-conventional forms of medicine. Trying to inflict my own scientific beliefs onto my patients just makes them feel defensive and alienated by modern medicine. I want my patients to feel that regardless of our differing views, they can always come and see me to discuss their health.

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When the actors impersonated the healer using realistic but completely made up mystical chants and movements, the patients were just as aware of the radiance and heat passing through their bodies and were unable to tell the difference between the work of the Reiki master and the actors. Now I would be wrong to criticise a profession for healing via the placebo effect as I use placebos all the time for my patients. The important thing to remember is that placebos do work. As I said, I am fairly sure that anti-inflammatory gel is of no more benefit for chronic back pain than rubbing on a placebo gel. This would suggest that it is the process of rubbing the gel on and thinking that it is reducing the pain rather than any pharmacological properties of the gel itself that are working.

Humankind: A Hopeful History
by Rutger Bregman
Published 1 Jun 2020

President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Other things have the potential to be true, if we believe in them. Our belief becomes what sociologists dub a self-fulfilling prophecy: if you predict a bank will go bust and that convinces lots of people to close their accounts, then, sure enough, the bank will go bust. Or take the placebo effect. If your doctor gives you a fake pill and says it will cure what ails you, chances are you will feel better. The more dramatic the placebo, the bigger that chance. Injection, on the whole, is more effective than pills, and in the old days even bloodletting could do the trick – not because medieval medicine was so advanced, but because people felt a procedure that drastic was bound to have an impact.

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The largest gains were among boys who looked Latino, a group typically subject to the lowest expectations in California.3 Rosenthal dubbed his discovery the Pygmalion Effect, after the mythological sculptor who fell so hard for one of his own creations that the gods decided to bring his statue to life. Beliefs we’re devoted to – whether they’re true or imagined – can likewise come to life, effecting very real change in the world. The Pygmalion Effect resembles the placebo effect (which I discussed in Chapter 1), except, instead of benefiting oneself, these are expectations that benefit others. At first I thought a study this old would surely have been debunked by now, like all those other mediagenic experiments from the 1960s. Not at all. Fifty years on, the Pygmalion Effect remains an important finding in psychological research.

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Kung people, here, here, here, here labour, forced, here language, here Latané, Bibb, here, here Le Bon, Gustave, here, here, here Le Texier, Thibault, here, here Lee, Richard, here legal institutions, origins of, here Lenin, here, here, here, here Lidegaard, Bo, here Lindegaard, Marie, here Lindemann, Frederick, here, here, here, here Lipo, Carl, here Lissauer, Ernst, here Lord of the Flies, The, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Louis XIV, King, here Love Actually, here, here Luther, Martin, here Luyendijk, Joris, here MacCurdy, John, here Machiavelli, Niccolò, here, here, here, here, here, here Madison, James, here Makin, Battle of, here Malaysia Airlines Flight here, here management science, here Mandela, Nelson, here, here, here, here Mao, here, here Markus, John, here Marshall, Colonel Samuel, here, here, here, here Martinson, Robert, here Maya civilisation, here #MeToo movement, here mean world syndrome, here meditation, here Meenan, Danny, here methamphetamine, here Milgram, Stanley, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Miller, Richard, here mirroring, here mismatches, here Mixon, Don, here, here Mol, Wietse, here, here Montgomery, General Bernard, here moralisation gap, here Moren, Albert, here Morocco, Sultan of, here motivation, see incentives and motivation Mulloy, William, here, here Mulrooney, Mara, here Mussolini, Benito, here, here, here Mycenaean civilisation, here ‘myth of pure evil’, here myths, here Napoleon Bonaparte, here, here Napoleonic wars, here Nature, here, here Naturuk, here Nazis, here, here, here, here, here deportation of Danish Jews, here neo-Nazis, here soldiers’ psychology, here, here Neanderthals, here, here, here, here, here, here, here negativity bias, here, here news, here, here, here fake news and propaganda, here Nias island, here Nietzsche, Friedrich, here nocebos, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here nomads, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here non-complementary behaviour, here nonviolent resistance, here Northcliffe, Lord, here Nunamit people, here object choice tests, here octopuses, here orangutans, here, here, here Oropeza, Javier, here orphans, Romanian, here Orwell, George, here, here Ostrom, Elinor, here, here, here oxytocin, here, here, here Panse, Friedrich, here Paris, fall of, here participatory budgeting, here, here Pelham-Burn, Lieutenant Arthur, here People’s Parliament, The, here Perry, Gina, here, here, here, here Pettigrew, Thomas, here, here Pinker, Steven, here, here, here, here placebo effect, here, here plague, here, here, here, here, here Plato, here, here play, here, here pluralistic ignorance, here Pol Pot, here, here Polynesian rat (Rattus exulans), here, here Polynesians, here, here, here Ponting, Clive, here Porto Allegre, here, here, here Postmes, Tom, here post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), here, here power, psychology of, here prisons, here, here, here, here, here, here, here private property, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Propria Cures, here Protestantism, here Prozi, Fred, here Psychological Warfare Division, here, here Pygmalion Effect, here racism, here, here, here, here, here, here rats, here ravens, here reality TV shows, here Reformation, here Reicher, Stephen, here, here relationships, extended, here, here religion, origins of, here, here reproductive rights, restriction of, here Ricard, Matthieu, here Robbers Cave Experiment, here, here, here Rodeo cowboys, here Rodriguez, Carlos, here Roggeveen, Arent, here Roggeveen, Jacob, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Roman legions, here Roosevelt, Franklin D., here, here Roosevelt, Theodore, here Rosenthal, Abe, here, here, here Rosenthal, Bob, here, here Ross, Karl, here Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here Routledge, Katherine, here, here Rowling, J.

How Emotions Are Made: The New Science of the Mind and Brain
by Lisa Feldman Barrett
Published 6 Mar 2017

The pain you experience as coming from the shot is really in your brain.17 My prediction-based explanation of pain is backed up by a couple of observations. When you are expecting pain, like the moment just before an injection, your brain regions that process nociception change their activity. That is, you simulate pain and therefore feel it. This phenomenon is called the nocebo effect. You’re probably more familiar with its counterpart, the placebo effect, which relieves pain using a medically ineffective treatment like a sugar pill. If you believe you’ll feel less pain, your beliefs influence your predictions and tune down your nociceptive input so you do feel less pain. Both placebos and nocebos involve chemical changes in the brain regions that process nociception.

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“Priming of Adult Pain Responses by Neonatal Pain Experience: Maintenance by Central Neuroimmune Activity.” Brain 135 (2): 404–417. Bekoff, Marc, and Jane Goodall. 2008. The Emotional Lives of Animals: A Leading Scientist Explores Animal Joy, Sorrow, and Empathy—and Why They Matter. Novato, CA: New World Library. Benedetti, Fabrizio. 2014. “Placebo Effects: From the Neurobiological Paradigm to Translational Implications.” Neuron 84 (3): 623–637. Benedetti, Fabrizio, Martina Amanzio, Sergio Vighetti, and Giovanni Asteggiano. 2006. “The Biochemical and Neuroendocrine Bases of the Hyperalgesic Nocebo Effect.” Journal of Neuroscience 26 (46): 12014–12022.

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Trends in Cognitive Sciences 18 (12): 642–646. Wager, T. D., J. Kang, T. D. Johnson, T. E. Nichols, A. B. Satpute, and L. F. Barrett. 2015. “A Bayesian Model of Category-Specific Emotional Brain Responses.” PLOS Computational Biology 11 (4): e1004066. Wager, Tor D., and Lauren Y. Atlas. 2015. “The Neuroscience of Placebo Effects: Connecting Context, Learning and Health.” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 16 (7): 403–418. Wager, Tor D., Lauren Y. Atlas, Martin A. Lindquist, Mathieu Roy, Choong-Wan Woo, and Ethan Kross. 2013. “An fMRI-Based Neurologic Signature of Physical Pain.” New England Journal of Medicine 368 (15): 1388–1397.

The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers--And the Coming Cashless Society
by David Wolman
Published 14 Feb 2012

The money illusion in the modern age can have a bizarre influence on our decisions. Because we have a built-in bias for bigger numbers, we presume that the higher-priced wine, automobile, restaurant, college, or hotel will offer better quality, better value. Economists have even shown that the placebo effect of a pretend medication (vitamin C pills, for instance) is stronger when the price of the “drug” is higher.18 The money illusion also helps to explain why we value a $100 gift card or check as less than an equivalent amount of cash, which is to say we are more apt to spend it. The artifice with gift cards is that they have no value, so we act as if they’re play money.

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See also Police Leapfrog scenario Learning Channel Legal Tender Lens array Libertarians Liberty Dollar discounts for Move Up mechanism for Liberty Services Liliuokalani (Queen) Liquid assets Loans Locke, John Longshot magazine Lott, Trent Lydia (Greek kingdom) McDonald’s Madoff, Bernie Malawi Malaysia Maldives Mann, Ronald Manta currency Mark of the Beast Mark Twain Mas, Ignacio Massachusetts Bay Colony MasterCard Media Mercy Corp Metals, prices of Mexico Microchips Migrant laborers Military Review Millennium Prize Problems Minority Report (film) Mint.com Monetary sovereignty Money creation of definition of vs. equity faith in value of(see also Currencies; confidence in) and feces functions of hoarding language of minting mobile money (see also Cellphones: used for money transactions) money clips money illusion money supply new ideas about origin of and religion as representing pure interaction and states/governments various objects as See also Cash; Coins; Currencies; Digital money; Electronic money; Paper money; Saving(s) Money Illusion, The (Fisher) Money laundering M-Pesa service Mundell, Robert Musulin, Toni Napoleonic Wars Natural disasters Nazism Netherlands New Jersey Transit train Newton, Sir Isaac New Yorker, The New York Times New Zealand Nicaragua Nickel Nigeria Nixon, Richard Non-native’s Tipping Anxiety NORFED North Korea Norway Nuclear weapons Numismatists/notaphilists Obama, Barack Oil prices Onion, The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe Oyster cards Pain Panama Paper money burning constitutionality of as contaminated high-denomination banknotes and history/identity of issuing country inks used for legacy features of U.S. paper money manufacturing $1 bills $100 bills origin of plastic banknotes printing redeem-ability of redesign/reissue of security features for (see also Security issues) in seventeenth century Europe size of stashing varieties of See also Cash; Dollar currency Papua New Guinea Paul, Ron Pawn Stars (reality show) Payday lenders Payment technologies and small-value transactions See also Cellphones: used for money transactions; Credit cards; PayPal PayPal Pearl Harbor Survivors Association Peer-to-peer transactions Pennies Peru Peso currency Pew Research Center Philippines Central Bank Philosophy of Money, The (Simmel) Placebo effect Plasectomy Platinum Poland Police Polo, Marco Ponzi schemes Portugal Pound sterling currency Poverty. See also under Cash Power grid Precious metals. See also Gold; Platinum; Silver Presley, Telle Prices. See also Inflation Priming (psychological) Privacy issues Progressives (political) Promissory notes Prostitution P versus NP problem Pyramid schemes Quicken software Raghubir, Priya Ramsey, Dave Rapture Regulations Rejection, feelings of Religion.

Democratizing innovation
by Eric von Hippel
Published 1 Apr 2005

We looked for (and did not find) differences in the capabilities or motivation of LU and non-LU project team members with respect to achieving a major new product advance. 3M managers also said that there was no difference in these matters, and a content analysis of formal annual performance goals set for the individual LU and non-LU team members in a division that allowed access to these data supported their views. We also found no major differences in the innovation opportunities teams faced. They also looked for Hawthorne or placebo effects that might 138 Chapter 10 affect the project teams differentially, and found none. (The Hawthorne effect can be described as “I do better because extra attention is being paid to me or to my performance.” The placebo effect can be described as “I expect this process will work and will strive to get the results I have been told are likely.”) We concluded that the 3M samples of funded LU and non-LU idea-generation projects, though not satisfying the random assignment criterion for experimental design, appeared to satisfy rough equivalence criteria in test and control conditions associated with natural or quasi-experimentation.

Heart: A History
by Sandeep Jauhar
Published 17 Sep 2018

Knowing that Jack was well versed in philosophy, I brought up Karl Popper’s theory of science and the requirement of falsifiability. Suggest an ailment we can test, I said excitedly. We could conduct a small trial, on and off magnet therapy. He shrugged, unfazed. “I try to keep myself from analyzing it too much or talking myself out of the placebo effect,” he said. When he got up to leave, he handed me a tiny magnet as a gift. “Keep it away from your wallet,” he advised. “It’ll erase your MetroCard.” • It was on Wednesdays that Jack would come to see me at the Bellevue cardiology clinic. Like many of my patients, he was a clinic veteran who had been through several cycles of fellows.

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Wayne, 68 mind-body interactions, 205 Mines, George, 153, 153–59, 161, 166 Minneapolis, 73, 80, 84, 171 Minneapolis Tribune, 78 Minnesota, 88, 168; University of, 74, 77, 80, 94, 168, 187 Minnesota Medicine, 95 minority groups, 62, 64, 122, 124, 157, 234 Mirowski, Michel, 173–77, 211, 239 misdiagnosis, 94 mitral valve, 69, 88, 193 Montgomery (Alabama), 68 Montreal, 153 morbidity, 138, 168 Morgagni, Giovanni Battista, 58 morphine drip, 197 Morristown (New Jersey), 232, 235–38 mortality rates, 90, 93, 113, 138, 168, 211; for cardiac wounds, 63, 68; reduction in, 96, 130, 157, 238–39 Mountin, Joseph, 117, 118 Mount Zion Hospital (San Francisco), 126 Mower, Morton, 174–75 Müller, Heinrich, 19 multi-organ failure, 193 multivariate analysis, 120 Munch, Edvard, 16 Muslims, 28–29 Mustard, William, 93 myocardial infarctions, see heart attacks/myocardial infarctions myocardial wire, 168–69 myopericarditis, 132–33 Nafis, Ibn al-, 41 National Guard, 202 National Heart Act (1948), 115 National Heart Institute (NHI), 115, 119–20, 123 National Institutes of Health, 87, 115, 117, 123n National Society of Professional Engineers, 171 natural catastrophes, 25–26, 28, 145 natural healers, 147, 165 Nature, 159 nausea, 150, 184, 192 negative affectivity, 127; see also anxiety; depression neuroscience, 53, 124, 231, 240 New Delhi (India), 9, 243 New England Journal of Medicine, 176, 232, 239 New York City, 51, 63, 64, 161, 234–35; hospitals in, 109, 207 (see also Bellevue Hospital); 9/11 terrorist attack on, 3, 201–205, 207, 210, 216–17 New York Times, 78, 84, 194 nightmares, 210, 219–21, 223–24 Niigata Prefecture (Japan), 25–26 9/11 terrorist attack, 3, 201–205, 207, 210, 216–17 nitroglycerin, 4 Nixon, Richard M., 121 Nobel Prize, 76, 205; in Physiology and Medicine, 109–10, 134 Normandy, landing of Allied troops in, 114 North Dakota, 69, 88, 97, 221 Northwestern University Medical School, 62 Null, Gary, 147, 149, 165 nutraceuticals, 148, 163, 181 Nyström, Gunnar, 90 NYU Medical Center (New York City), 207 obesity, 237, 238 O’Connor, Flannery, 69 “On Dynamic Equilibrium in the Heart” (Mines), 158 “On the Nature of Turbulence” (Ruelle and Takens), 160n open-heart surgery, 34, 61, 65, 76, 85, 136, 187; alternatives to, 142, 242; with cross-circulation, 80, 168; with heart-lung machines, 94–96 Oregon, University of, 138 organ harvesting, 187–88 organ rejection, 186, 188 Ornish, Dean, 231–32, 235–38 “Oroya fever,” 105 Oscar Mayer Company, 121 oscilloscopes, 17, 19, 139 Osler, William, 70, 84, 98, 131, 133; Harveian Oration of, 46 oxygenation, 73–74, 86, 91, 93–94 pacemakers, 34, 53, 130, 167–71, 173, 176, 230; external, 167, 190; natural, 151–52, 152 Padua, University of, 42, 43 Pagenstecher, Sanitatsrath, 67–68 pain, 9, 22, 113, 139, 141, 147, 196–97, 227; absence of response to, 188; chest, 24–25, 54, 114, 131–33, 164, 204, 224; of implanted defibrillator shocks, 208, 210, 212, 214 Pakistan, 28 palpitations, 210; see also arrhythmias; ventricular fibrillation parasympathetic nervous system, 30–31, 59, 106 Parkinson’s disease, 221–23 Pavlovian response, 209 Pearl Harbor, Japanese bombing of, 114 Pearson, Karl, 23 Pennsylvania, 94; University of, 124 pericarditis, 132–33 pericardium, 56, 60, 62–65, 72, 242 Persia, 41 Peru, 105 Peter Bent Brigham Hospital (Boston), 90n “phantom shock,” 208 Philadelphia, 73, 86, 163 physical activity, see exercise placebo effect, 148 Plainview Hospital (Plainview, New York), 224 plaque, 110, 133, 177, 231–33, 236, 242; atherosclerotic, 37, 42, 118, 129, 134, 221; visualization of, 4–5, 113, 121, 137, 142 platelets, 37 Plato, 38 pneumonia, 77, 84, 193 Poland, 173–74 Popper, Karl, 148 post-traumatic stress disorder, 207, 210, 213 potassium, 72–73, 97 Prague, 138 precordial thumps, 138 premature ventricular contractions (PVCs), 206, 233, 241 pressure-volume loops, 129 Prévost, Jean Louis, 171 Princeton University, 89 “Probing the Right Ventricle of the Heart” (Forssmann), 107 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 160 processed foods, 123 Provident Hospital (Chicago), 61–62 Prussian State Library, 41 psychosocial risk factors, 24, 119–20, 123–25, 129, 231, 236, 240 Public Broadcasting System (PBS), 10 Public Health Service, U.S., 115, 117, 118 pulmonary embolectomy, 89–90 pulmonary function tests, 3 pulse deficit, 55 “pump head,” 96 Punjab (India), 9, 28, 34, 129 quality-of-life issues, 125, 237 radio-frequency ablative procedure, 52, 211, 217 Radio Shack, 147 rapamycin, 144 rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, 221 Reconstruction, 62 “reentry,” 154, 154–59, 161 reflex arc, 53 refractory period, 151–55, 159 Rehn, Ludwig, 65–68, 77 REM sleep, see rapid eye movement (REM) sleep Renaissance, 20, 41 respiratory failure, 193 restitution, 160 resuscitation, see cardiopulmonary resuscitation Richards, Dickinson, 99, 109 Richter, Curt, 30–31, 59, 214 Richter scale, 25 risk factors, 4, 54, 132, 232, 233, 240; epidemiology of, see Framingham study; ethnic differences in, 122–24, 233–234; psychosocial, 24, 119, 123, 124, 127–30, 206; of heart attack survivors, 176, 211–12, 237, 239 Roberts, John Bingham, 63 Rohman, Michael, 97 Roman Catholic Church, 22 Roman Empire, 40 romantic love, heart as locus of, 21 Rome, 42 Romeis, Peter, 105, 107 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 114–15, 117, 120 Rosenman, Ray, 126–27 Ross, Donald, 85 Royal Infirmary (Edinburgh), 137 Ruelle, David, 160n Russia, 118 Sacred Heart of Jesus, 22 St.

Happy Inside: How to Harness the Power of Home for Health and Happiness
by Michelle Ogundehin
Published 29 Apr 2020

For sure there is as much literature passionately vouching for their efficacy as there is declaring it to be utter bunkum, so it may well be a placebo effect (and I’d pop crystals and homeopathy into this category too). But then, defined as something entirely inert in the guise of a healing medicine, a placebo can be therapeutic in the way it connects mind and body. And I am a firm believer in the maxim that where the mind goes, the body follows. After all, if you watch something sad, this provokes a physical response – tears; likewise laughter occurs at the stimulus of seeing or hearing something perceived by the brain as funny. Both are perfect examples of mind–body connections. And the placebo effect has been proven time and time again through rigorous scientific investigation.

Brief Peeks Beyond: Critical Essays on Metaphysics, Neuroscience, Free Will, Skepticism and Culture
by Bernardo Kastrup
Published 28 May 2015

Here is where the art and skill of the healer comes into play, for this ‘dropping in’ must be accomplished through bypassing egoic barriers and defense mechanisms. A form of benign manipulation is required, which may conflict with present-day notions of ethics. A case in point is the so-called placebo effect. Current practice in approving new drugs and treatments is that they must be demonstrated to be more effective than the proverbial ‘sugar pills.’ A serious problem for the pharmaceutical industry is the growing effectiveness of placebos in combating illness, which makes new drugs increasingly more difficult to approve.182 The elephant in the room, obviously, is that placebos work, and more so in recent years.

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An automated training paradigm reveals long-term memory in planarians and its persistence through head regeneration. The Journal of Experimental Biology, 216, pp. 3799-3810. Silberman, S. (2009). Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why. Wired Magazine, 17.09, 24 August 2009. [Online]. Available from: http://archive.wired.com/medtech/drugs/magazine/17-09/ff_placebo_effect [Accessed 23 December 2014]. Smolin, L. (2013). Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Steadman, I. (2014). Deepak Chopra doesn’t understand quantum physics, so Brian Cox wants $1,000,000 from him. New Statesman, 7 July 2014.

Bad Pharma: How Medicine Is Broken, and How We Can Fix It
by Ben Goldacre
Published 1 Jan 2012

Tumours were ‘90 per cent gone in three months’, said one. Whether that was exaggeration or fluke, the reality is that fair tests showed no benefit. But the desperate patients disagreed, and asserted their case plainly and simply: Iressa ‘will save lives’. This personal testimony was in all likelihood a combination of the placebo effect and the natural fluctuation in symptoms that all patients experience. That didn’t seem to matter. When the committee charged with approving the drug cast their votes, they went 11–3 in favour. It’s hard to know what to make of this process, since the vote went against not only the surrogate outcome data, but also the evidence from very large trials showing no benefit on real-world outcomes or survival.

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These simple trials have one disadvantage, which you may already have spotted, in that they aren’t ‘blinded’, so the patients know the name of the drug they’ve received. This is a problem in some studies: if you believe that you’ve been given a very effective medicine, or that you’ve been given a rubbish one, then the power of your beliefs and expectations can affect your health, through a phenomenon known as the placebo effect. If you’re comparing a painkiller against a dummy sugar pill, then a patient who knows they’ve been given a sugar pill for pain is likely to be annoyed and in more pain. But it’s harder to believe that patients have firm beliefs about the relative benefits of atorvastatin and simvastatin, and that these beliefs will then impact on cardiovascular mortality five years later.

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The FDA saw this coming a long way off, so it declined to license the product at all, specifically citing concerns about off-label use after the approval committee’s unanimous ‘no’ vote.33 This might be a good moment to mention that the evidence for testosterone patches being any use, even after surgery, is extremely weak, from two trials in very unrepresentative ‘ideal patients’, showing marginal benefits against a massive placebo effect, with common side effects (sometimes apparently irreversible), and no long-term safety data.34 It’s worth noting that almost no treatments for FSD have come to market, and crucially, all of the disease-mongering activity we have seen happened in the lead-up to their approval. This was simply the academic groundwork in the companies’ ‘publication planning’ programme, where they prove that a problem is widespread, and create a desire for a cure.

How to Invent Everything: A Survival Guide for the Stranded Time Traveler
by Ryan North
Published 17 Sep 2018

By keeping both patient and doctor in the dark, you prevent them from either consciously or unconsciously influencing the result. Remember: there is always the placebo effect, which is where humans getting treatment tend to report feeling better, even if that treatment is ineffective. Double-blind trials can actually help solve this: when patients know there’s the possibility they’re getting a placebo instead of actual medicine, there’s more doubt in their treatment, and the placebo effect is weakened. Finally, while you likely won’t have any medicine when you start out, there are several ailments that can be treated using only water!

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See also frequencies musical frequencies, 344, 402t, 403t, 404t musical instruments, 341–43 musical notation, 347–50, 348n, 349n music theory, 343–46 NAND (gate), 365–67, 365t, 366f, 367n, 367t natural symbol (in music), 350 negative mass, 31 negative numbers, 26t, 28, 370n neutrons, 306–7, 309 neutron star, 311 newton, 44 Newton, Isaac, 182n–83n nitric acid, 391 nitrogen in ammonia production, 383 crop rotation and, 47–48, 50–52 in fertilizer production, 383, 388, 392 nitrous oxide, 392 non-metals, 309 non-sucky numbers, 11t, 21–29 noon, 273, 273n north Ryan, vi, 37 true and magnetic, 205 NOT (gate), 362–63, 363f, 363t, 365, 367, 371–72, 372n not breathing, 336–37 notes (musical), 344–45 nuclear reactors, 186 nucleus, 306–7 numbers and number systems abstract, 24t axioms, 27–29 communication and, 29 complex, 27t fractions, 25t Hindu/Arabic numerals in, 22 imaginary, 27t irrational, 25t negative, 26t, 28 non-sucky, 11t, 21–29 positional value system in, 22 positive, 28 prime, 25t rational, 25t real, 26t written, 24t zero, 26t, 28 nutrition basic, 107–12 guidelines for, 108–9 oak trees, 69 obsidian, 172n octaves, 344 oil-based ink, 255–56 one-point perspective, 319 opium poppy, 69–70 OR (gate), 365–67, 365f, 365t, 366f, 366t, 367n, 367t orbit(s) of atomic particles, 307–9 of earth, 206–7, 206f oxidizer, 117n pack animals, 85 paddlewheels, 287n paint rollers, 256n panes of glass, 173–74 paper making, 70, 248–50 stethoscope, 156 papyrus, 70 parasites lice as, 105 mosquitos as, 105–6 from pigs, 97 parasitic worms, 48n parchment, 248 pasteurization, 139–40 pathogens, 48n, 97 paved roads, 239 Pelton turbines, 179–82, 180n pendulum, 44, 271n penicillin, 139, 151–55, 232, 328 Penicillium mold, 152–55 percussion drilling, 159–60 percussion instruments, 341, 341n periodic table, 307, 380–81 perspective, 317f, 318–22, 318f, 319n, 320f petri dishes, 153 phenols, 120 philosophy, 313, 314t–315t phlogiston, 30–31 phosphorus discovery of, 122n in iron ore, 243n as plant nutrient, 52 phylloxera (insects), 68–69 Pi, 400t pianissimo, 350 piano, 342 pickling, 138–39 pictograms, 17–18, 18f piezo-electricity, 204 pigeons, 97–98 pig iron, 243 pigments, 322–23 pigs, 96–97 pine tar, 120 pintle, 283f Pirsig, Robert M., 240 piston engines, 183 pistons, 183, 187–91, 190n, 191f pitch (wood product), 120, 167n, 283 pitch inflation (music), 345n–46n pizza, 165 placebo effect, 329, 329n plants domestication of, 45–46 nutrients for, 47–48, 52 pigments from, 322 salt and, 147–48, 148n useful, 60–81 plaster, 238 plows, 95, 130–35 plowshare, 132, 133f plumb line, 270 points of sale, 286f poisons, 56–57. See also toxicity poles, magnetic, 267, 267n, 268f Pollio, Marcus Vitruvius, 237 positional value system, 22 positive numbers, 28, 370n posters, 256 potash.

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload
by Daniel J. Levitin
Published 18 Aug 2014

To put this into Bayesian form, the probability of getting a cold, given that you took echinacea, still equals .67. By the way, the placebo effect—that we feel better and often get better just from taking something, even if it has no medicinal ingredients—is very real and very strong. Larger pills have a bigger placebo effect than small pills. Sham injections have a larger effect than pills. A great deal of the effect of products with no known medicinal value may simply be this placebo effect. This is why double-blind, randomized clinical control trials are necessary: Everyone in the study gets a pill and nobody knows who got what.

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See brain physiology news media, 338–40 Newton, Isaac, 162 New Yorker, 120, 336 New York Times, 6, 339, 365 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 375 Nixon, Richard, 201 NMDA receptor, 167 nonlinear thinking and perception, 38, 215, 217–18, 262, 380 Norman, Don, 35 number needed to treat metric, 236, 240, 247, 264, 264 Obama, Barack, 219, 303 object permanence, 24 Office of Presidential Correspondence, 303 Olds, James, 101 Old Testament, 151 O’Neal, Shaquille, 352–53 One Hundred Names for Love (Ackerman), 364–65 online dating, 130–34, 422n130, 423n132 optical character recognition (OCR), 93, 119, 119 optimal information, 308–10 orders of magnitude, 354–55, 358–59, 361, 363, 400n7 organizational structure, 271–76, 315–18, 470n315, 471n317 Otellini, Paul, 380–81 Overbye, Dennis, 6, 19 Oxford English Dictionary, 114 Oxford Filing Supply Company, 93–94 Page, Jimmy, 174 pair-bonding, 128, 142 paperwork, 293–306 Pareto optimality, 269 parking tickets, 237, 451n237 Parkinson’s disease, 167–68 passwords, xx, 103–5 Patel, Shreena, 258 paternalism, medical, 245, 257 pattern recognition, 28, 249 Patton, George S., 73–74 peak performance, 167, 189, 191–92, 203, 206 Peer Instruction (Mazur), 367 perfectionism, 174, 199–200 periodic table of elements, 372–73, 373, 480n372 Perry, Bruce, 56 Peterson, Jennifer, 368 pharmaceuticals, 256–57, 343, 345–46 Picasso, Pablo, 283 Pierce, John R., 73 Pirsig, Robert, 69–73, 89, 295–97, 300 placebo effect, 253, 255 place memory, 82–83, 106, 293–94 planning, 43, 161, 174–75, 319–26 Plato, 14, 58, 65–66 plausibility, 350, 352, 478n352 Plimpton, George, 200 Plutarch, 340 Poldrack, Russ, 97 Polya, George, 357 Ponzo illusion, 21, 22 positron emission tomography (PET), 40 prediction, 344–45 prefrontal cortex, 161 Area 47, 287 and attention, 16–17, 43, 45–46 and changing behaviors, 176 and children’s television, 368 and creative time, 202, 210 and decision-making, 277, 282 and flow state, 203, 207 and information overload, 8 and literary fiction, 367 and manager/worker distinction, 176 and multitasking, 96, 98, 307 and procrastination, 197, 198, 200–201 and sleep, 187 and task switching, 171–72 and time organization, 161, 165–66, 174, 180 See also brain physiology preselection effect, 331, 343 Presidential Committee on Information Literacy, 365 primacy effect, 55, 408n56 primates, 17–18, 125–26, 135 Prince, 174 Princeton Theological Seminary, 145–46 prior distributions, 249 prioritization, 5–7, 33–35, 379–80 probability.

Admissions: A Life in Brain Surgery
by Henry Marsh
Published 3 May 2017

The victim’s neck is supposed to be cracked like a whip – something that has never in fact been demonstrated and is probably fallacious. I used to see many of these patients every year in my outpatient clinic and it was clear to me that most of them were not consciously malingering – instead they were the willing, perhaps hapless, victims of a ‘nocebo’ effect, the opposite of the placebo effect. With the placebo effect, which is well understood, people will feel better, or suffer less pain, simply as a result of suggestion and expectation. With ‘whiplash injury’, the possibility of financial compensation for the victims, combined with the powerful suggestion that they have suffered a significant injury, can result in real and severe disability, even though it is, in a sense, purely imaginary.

This Book Could Fix Your Life: The Science of Self Help
by New Scientist and Helen Thomson
Published 7 Jan 2021

HOW TO HARNESS THE POWER OF PLACEBO What we’ve just discussed points us to a deeper truth. It might sound like New Age nonsense, but it’s not just that a healthy body is a fast track to a healthy mind. We now have solid evidence that the reverse is also true: with the right mindset you can think yourself faster, fitter, slimmer – and younger. It’s all to do with the placebo effect. Placebos are inert treatments used in clinical trials to test how effective a drug is. You divide your volunteers randomly into two identical groups, giving half a real drug and the other a sugar pill. With no active ingredients the placebo shouldn’t have any effect. Yet many studies have shown that placebos can often bring about significant changes, triggering the release of natural painkillers and lowering blood pressure, for example – all because of people’s expectations.

…

Yet many studies have shown that placebos can often bring about significant changes, triggering the release of natural painkillers and lowering blood pressure, for example – all because of people’s expectations. The mind is so mysterious that these effects can occur even when people are told they are taking a placebo. Not only that, the placebo effect also has an evil twin, the nocebo effect, whereby people can experience side effects such as nausea, rashes and emotional changes from inert treatments. The power of the placebo extends to our behaviours. For instance, in one study, golfers who thought they were using a professional’s putter perceived the hole to be larger and easier to putt, and were more accurate as a result.

Badvertising
by Andrew Simms

Yet most studies have failed to find any evidence that these subliminal messages actually work. On the other hand, in studies of recordings designed to help improve memory or build self-esteem, many who took part with the hope of self-improvement abilities ended up believing that the tapes had been effective.41 Were those recordings just offering an illusory placebo effect? People with large budgets who want to influence your choices clearly think that subliminal messaging and priming works. Such as when Ferrari’s Formula 1 cars displayed a barcode that was criticised for subliminally flashing the logo of its sponsor company, Marlboro. The barcode was eventually found to be in violation of the ban on tobacco advertising, and Ferrari were compelled to remove the design in 2010.

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Mellett and P.M. Williams (1991) Self-improvement using subliminal audiotapes: consumer benefit or consumer fraud? Presented at the Meeting of the Western Psychological Association, San Francisco, CA, April. And finally: Merikle, P.M. and H.F. Skanes (1992) Subliminal self-help audiotapes: search for placebo effects. Journal of Applied Psychology, 77(5), October, 772–6. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1429349 42. Elgendi, M., P. Kumar, S. Barbic, N. Howard, D. Abbott and A. Cichocki (2018) Subliminal priming – state of the art and future perspectives. Behavioral Science (Basel), 8(6), 30 May, 54. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6027235/ 43.

The Complete Thyroid Book
by Kenneth Ain and M. Sara Rosenthal
Published 1 Mar 2005

But as of this writing, anyone who first suggests to you that T3 should be routinely added to your T4 or other medications you might be taking or used as a solo therapy is not up to date. In the peer-reviewed literature, there is some discussion of whether a long-acting T3 therapy could be developed. Additionally, there is recognition that there is a subset of patients who simply feel better on T3/T4 for reasons we don’t yet understand. Many attribute this to a placebo effect, which is a real physiological effect where an individual’s strong belief in a medication or therapy produces endorphins in the brain that actually help the individual feel better. Why Do I Still Feel Hypothyroid? If you have normal TSH levels but still have symptoms of hypothyroidism, then you will be relieved to know that the symptoms that persist are not likely to be related to your hypothyroidism and you can, at last, investigate other causes and remedies.

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Also, even if we assume these testimonials are real, they fail to account for two well-known facts. First, a lot of people will just get better on their own because these symptoms tend to resolve once certain stressors are removed—even in people who have symptoms for months at a time. And second, the placebo effect (the power to heal yourself based solely on the belief that you’re taking effective medicine) often makes people feel better, as discussed further on. “My Obesity Is Caused by Hypothyroidism, Even Though My TSH Levels Are Normal” How many euthyroid people are obese? Millions! Why is that? Because they eat more food than they burn off in activity.

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If you are hypothyroid and depressed, then T4 will do the same job on your depressed brain as taking T3, but its beneficial effects will be more long-lasting, yet not as immediate, since T4 has a longer half-life. When you give depressed people a placebo and tell them it is T3, assuring them that it will lift depression, at least half of those people will report an improvement because of the placebo effect, which is a real pharmacologic effect caused by our natural endorphins and the power of our beliefs. In fact, several medical ethics articles point out that clinical control trials using placebos are actually testing two types of “drugs,” since placebo is not the same as “nothing.” 262 THYROI D M ISCONCEPTIONS AN D M ISI N FOR M ATION Misconceptions About Radioactive Iodine (RAI) Radioactive iodine (RAI) is used for thyroid scans (see Chapter 2) as well as therapy for Graves’ disease and thyroid cancer (see Chapter 12).

The Matter of the Heart: A History of the Heart in Eleven Operations
by Thomas Morris
Published 31 May 2017

His brother John started his career as William’s assistant in his school of anatomy in Soho, and probably became interested in the possibilities of surgical aneurysm repair as a result.13 William was a figure of great eminence, respected as a teacher and as the leading obstetrician of his generation, but his reputation would soon be eclipsed by that of his younger brother. John Hunter was not only a talented clinician but also an important experimental scientist who performed pioneering research into transplantation and the placebo effect. His deep interest in the structures of the body and their functions led him to study how anatomy differed between humans and other animals, and over many years he amassed a huge collection of more than 15,000 specimens drawn from several hundred animal and plant species. After his death it was purchased by the British government, and although a large number of items were destroyed in an air raid in 1941 it still forms the core of the Hunterian Museum of the Royal College of Surgeons in London, one of the world’s greatest anatomical collections.

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Of the nine patients who underwent the sham operation, five noted significant improvement, and two who had been severely disabled before their ‘surgery’ were once again able to engage in strenuous exercise.51 The artery-tying operation was obviously worthless. Rarely has there been a more striking demonstration of the placebo effect, whereby the mere expectation of recovery improves a patient’s condition. As the heart surgeon Donald Effler put it, ‘The patient with coronary artery disease gets initial relief of angina from almost anything: this includes walking into the reception room of the surgeon’s office.’52 It was a dramatic indication that clinicians needed to find physical proof of improvement rather than rely on the patient’s impressions.

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.: An Inquiry into the Symptoms and Causes of … Angina Pectoris 188 Parsonnet, Victor 174–5, 176 patent ductus arteriosus 43–9, 52, 86 pathogens 122 Paul of Aegina 8–9 percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) 304 percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) 296–9, 300–1, 302, 303, 304 perfusion 92; coronary 261–7 perfusion pumps 252–4 pericardium, 15, 17, 57 Perlman, Itzhak 54 PERVs see porcine endogenous retroviruses Petit de la Villéon, Dr 23 Pevsner, Nikolaus: The Buildings of England 313 Pfizer (company) 141 Philadelphia: Academy of Surgery 44; cat population 97; Episcopal Hospital 130; Hahneman University Hospital 106, 129 pigs’ hearts and valves 144–5, 146, 335–8, 343, 344 Pink Floyd: Atom Heart Mother 176 Pitcairn, David 122 Pittsburgh: Carnegie Mellon University 344; University of 338 placebo effect 61, 198–9 plaques 187, 190, 303 platelets 64 Plavsona, Marie 20 Playboy magazine 277 Pliny the Elder: Natural History 8 pneuma 59 pneumonia 110, 126, 234, 275–6 polymers 79, 134, 257, 296—7, 334, 340, 344; ‘scaffolds’ 145, 340–41, 342, 344; stent 304; suture material 203 popliteal aneurysms 61–2 porcine endogenous retroviruses (PERVs) 337 Portner, Peer 278 ‘post-perfusion syndrome’ 116 potassium citrate 115 Pottenger, Eugene 206 Potts, Willis 54 Poynton, Frederick 38 Prendergast, Bernard 314–15 Prévost, Jean-Louis 91, 159, 160 primates 225, 335, 336, 338, 339; see chimpanzees; baboons; gorillas; monkeys PTCA see angioplasty Puel, Jacques 301n pulmonary arteries 30, 31, 32, 40, 42, 48, 221, 222; embolism 89 pulmonary circulation 30 pulmonary stenosis 40, 41, 107, 289, 306–7 pulmonary valve 120, 121, 124; replacement 317 pulmonary veins 43, 120, 221, 222, 232 pulse, the 278–9 ‘pump, the’ 113–14 pumps 254–5; balloon 262–3; perfusion 252–4; roller 99 radiofrequency ablation 308, 310–11 radiography 22–3 radiotherapy 223 Randomized Evaluation of Mechanical Assistance for the Treatment of Congestive Heart Failure (REMATCH) trial 280 Rashkind, William 304–6 Reemtsma, Keith 224–5, 334 regurgitation see mitral regurgitation Rehn, Ludwig 18–19, 121, 123–4, 345 Reiner, Jonathan 183 rejection, post-transplant 144, 145, 216, 219, 220, 222, 223, 227, 234, 237, 245–6, 247–8, 265; hyperacute 335, 336, 337–8 REMATCH see Randomized Evaluation … restenosis 301, 302, 303 rheumatic fever/heart disease 121–3, 125, 126, 127, 132, 134, 208, 253, 263 rheumatism 122 Richards, Dickinson 288, 290 Richmond, Calvin 111 Ricketts, Benjamin Merrill 37; The Surgery of the Heart and Lungs 6 right ventricular hypertrophy 40, 41 Roberts, John 14–15 Roberts, Julia 162n Robinovitch, Louise 159–60 robotics/robots, surgical 324–5, 326–8 Rohrbach, Leroy 2–3, 4–5, 24 Röntgen, Wilhelm 22 Rose, Eric 244–5 Ross, Donald 142, 143, 145–6, 238–9, 242 Ross, John 290–91 Ross, Ronald 251; ‘The Vivisector Vivisected’ 251–2 Ross Procedure 143 Rostropovich, Mstislav 54 Royal College of Surgeons, London: Hunterian Museum 61 Royal Society 91; Philosophical Transactions 39 Rubio-Alvarez, Victor 306n Rush, Boyd 224, 225—6 Russell, John Richard 223 Rutherford, Barry 302 Ryan, Patrick 239 SA node see sinoatrial node Sabiston, David 204 sacciform aneurysms 72 St Laurent, Robert 278 St Louis: Children’s Hospital 45; Washington University 44, 124 St Thomas’ solution 116 St Vitus’s Dance 122 Salisbury, Peter 256 Samways, Daniel 123 Sanders, Samuel 54 Sandoz (company) 247 saphenous vein grafts 204, 205, 209, 210 Saucier, Dave 279 Sauerbruch, Ferdinand 287 Saxon, Eileen 27–8, 29–33 scar tissue 193, 266, 303, 341, 342n Scarfe, Gerald 239 Scheinman, Melvin 309, 310n Schlumpf, Maria 297 Schlumpf, Walter 297 Schmidt, A. 92 Schneider, Richard 285, 286, 287 Schrire, Velva 230 Schröder, Waldemar von 92 Schroeder, Bill 276–7 Schuster, Edgar 252–3 Scott, Donald 238 Seattle: University of Washington 198 Sellers, Peter 149–50, 249 Senning, Åke 145, 169, 170, 201, 215, 296, 297, 304 Sewell, William 255 Shaw, George Bernard 94 Shaw, Laura 293–4 Sherman, Harry 345–6 Shiley, Donald see Björk–Shiley valve shock, circulatory 26 Shumacker, Harris 69, 73 Shumway, Norman 220–21, 223, 226, 235, 245, 246, 248, 255; collaboration with Lower 221—2, 227, 228, 230, 234, 241, 242; on DeVries’s artificial heart 276, 277; interest in hypothermia 114, 221; on xenografting 339 ‘shunts’ 31, 82, 87, 196, 211 Siddons, Harold 171 Sigwart, Ulrich 300–3 Simon, André 333 Sinha, Sanjay 342 sinoatrial node 154, 155, 174 sirolimus 303 skin, artificial 340 skin cells: conversion to stem cells 341 skin grafts 215–16, 219 Smithy, Horace 128–9 Søndergaard, Lars 319 Sones, Mason 199–200, 202, 206, 291 Souttar, Henry 126–8, 130, 131, 132 stab wounds, early xi, 11, 15–19 Starling’s law 259, 271 Starr, Albert 118, 119, 136–40, 293 Starr–Edwards Valve 140, 144 Starzl, Thomas 248 stem cell technology 341–2 Steno, Bishop Nicolas 39–40 stenosis 121; see aortic stenosis; mitral stenosis Stent, Charles 300 stents/stenting 212, 300, 301, 302–3, 316–17; bioabsorbable 304; drug-eluting 303–4 stereoscopic radiography 23 sterilisation 7; see antisepsis/asepsis sternotomy 325–6 steroids 220, 241 stethoscope 44, 48, 100, 121, 128, 139, 285 stitches/stitching see sutures Stockholm: Karolinska Hospital 169; Sabbatsberg Hospital 51 Stokes–Adams attacks 165, 170 Stowell Park, Gloucestershire 1–2 Streptococcus pyogenes 122 stress 154n strychnine 15 suramin 94 Sushruta 186, 215 Sutherland, Kiefer 162n sutures/suturing: blood vessels 75, 76–7, 202, 207, 209, 215, 216; in the heart 13, 14–15, 17; polymer 203 SVT see tachycardia, supraventricular Swan, Henry 75, 106–7, 114 Sweeney (Nicoli), Lorraine 46–9, 54 Sydenham’s chorea 122 Sydney: Crown Street Women’s Hospital 155, 156; St Vincent’s Hospital 332 sympathectomy 190, 191 syphilis 57–8, 59, 67, 190 systole (phase of cardiac cycle) 120, 121 tachycardia 152, 178, 182, 308–9, 310; supraventricular (SVT) 308; ventricular 179 Tagliacozzi, Gaspare 215–16 Taussig, Helen 28–9, 31, 33, 34, 36, 37, 41, 42, 110, 180, 305; see also ‘Blalock–Taussig shunt’ TAVI see transcatheter aortic valve implantation Taylor, Doris 343 Ted E.

Mistakes Were Made (But Not by Me): Why We Justify Foolish Beliefs, Bad Decisions, and Hurtful Acts
by Carol Tavris and Elliot Aronson
Published 6 May 2007

To guard against the bias of our own direct observations, scientists invented the control group: the group that isn't getting the new therapeutic method, the people who aren't getting the new drug. Most people understand the importance of control groups in the study of a new drug's effectiveness, because without a control group, you can't say if people's positive response is due to the drug or to a placebo effect, the general expectation that the drug will help them. For instance, one study of women who had complained of sexual problems found that 41 percent said that their libido returned when they took Viagra. So, however, did 43 percent of the control group who took a sugar pill.18 (This study showed conclusively that the organ most involved in sexual excitement is the brain.)

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presidential debate with Kennedy, [>] Watergate scandal, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>] (n.2) Nobel Peace Prize, [>], [>] nonverbal signals, confessions and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Nostradamus, [>] Nuer (Sudan), tooth extraction by, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] obedience to authority, [>]–[>], [>], [>] (n.27)—[>] O'Brien, Larry, [>] Offer, Daniel, [>] Ofshe, Richard, [>] O'Malley, Jack, [>] Orizio, Riccardo, [>] Oz, Amos, [>] Page, Bradley, [>], [>] Painted Bird, The (Kosinski), [>]–[>] Palestinians, conflict with Israel, [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] panic attacks, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>]–[>] pardons, wrongful, [>] parents blaming, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] childhood sexual abuse and, [>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] false memories concerning, [>]–[>] recovered-memory therapy and, [>]–[>] patents, [>]–[>] patriarchy, [>]–[>] penis envy, [>] Peres, Shimon, [>]–[>], [>] perpetrator narrative, [>]–[>] escalation of brutality, [>]–[>] gulf between victim and, [>]–[>] obedience experiments of Milgram and, [>]–[>], [>], [>] (n.27)—[>] perpetrators of evil, [>]–[>] reconciliation and, [>]–[>] strategies and, [>]–[>] Petersen, Betsy, [>] Pfingst, Paul, [>] Pfizer, Inc., [>] pharmaceuticals industry clinical trials, [>]–[>] conflicts of interest, [>]–[>] funding bias and, [>]–[>] gifts and, [>]–[>], [>] physicians. See also mental-health practitioners conflicts of interest, [>]–[>] health-care system problems and, [>]–[>] psychiatrists, [>]–[>] sterilization practices, [>], [>] Pines, Ayala, [>]–[>] placebo effect, [>] Pogo, [>] police corruption, [>]–[>], [>], [>] polio vaccine, [>] Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), The (Spencer), [>] polygraph tests, catharsis and, [>]–[>] power, without accountability, [>] Pratkanis, Anthony, [>]–[>] prejudice blacks and, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>] Chinese immigrants and, [>] gay people and, [>] in-groups and, [>]–[>] Jews and, [>]–[>], [>] in justifying ill treatment, [>]–[>] in sports, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] ubiquity of, [>], [>] privilege, as blind spot, [>]–[>], [>] (n.6) Procter & Gamble, [>] professional informers, [>]–[>], [>] profiling, [>] prosecutor bias, [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>]–[>], [>], [>] (n.8) pseudoscience, [>], [>] (n.7) psychiatrists, [>]–[>], [>], [>], [>] psychoanalysis, [>]–[>] psychotherapists training of, [>]–[>] confirmation bias in, [>]–[>] psychotherapy, [>]–[>], [>]–[>] dangers of closed loop in, [>] pyramid of choice, [>]–[>], [>]–[>].

Dollars and Sense: How We Misthink Money and How to Spend Smarter
by Dr. Dan Ariely and Jeff Kreisler
Published 7 Nov 2017

Moti Amar (Onno College), Ziv Carmon (INSEAD), and Dan Ariely (Duke), “See Better If Your Sunglasses Are Labeled Ray-Ban: Branding Can Influence Objective Performance” (working paper). 10. Belsky and Gilovich, Why Smart People Make Big Money Mistakes, 137. 11. Baba Shiv (Stanford), Ziv Carmon (INSEAD), and Dan Ariely (MIT), “Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay For,” Journal of Marketing Research 42, no. 4 (2005): 383–393. 12. Marco Bertini (London Business School), Elie Ofek (Harvard Business School), and Dan Ariely (Duke), “The Impact of Add-On Features on Consumer Product Evaluations,” Journal of Consumer Research 36 (2009): 17–28. 13.

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Ilana Polyak, “Sudden Wealth Can Leave You Broke,” CNBC, http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/01/sudden-wealth-can-leave-you-broke.html. CHAPTER 13: WE OVEREMPHASIZE MONEY 1. Rebecca Waber (MIT), Baba Shiv (Stanford), Ziv Carmon (INSEAD), and Dan Ariely (MIT), “Commercial Features of Placebo and Therapeutic Efficacy,” JAMA 299, no. 9 (2008): 1016–1017. 2. Baba Shiv (Stanford), Carmon Ziv (INSEAD), and Dan Ariely (MIT), “Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay For,” Journal of Marketing Research 42, no. 4 (2005): 383–393. 3. Felix Salmon, “How Money Can Buy Happiness, Wine Edition,” Reuters, October 27, 2013, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2013/10/27/how-money-can-buy-happiness-wine-edition/. 4.

The Lucky Years: How to Thrive in the Brave New World of Health
by David B. Agus
Published 29 Dec 2015

When Miss Lunsford, a nutritionist and graduate student at Cornell University working in the lab of biochemist and gerontologist Clive McCay, shared these results at a gathering to focus on the problems of aging led by the New York Academy of Medicine, no one—not even Lunsford and her teammates—could explain this “age-reversal” transformation. The year was 1955, the same year the Food and Drug Administration approved the polio vaccine, the power of the placebo effect was first written about, Albert Einstein died at the age of seventy-six, and Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were born.2 Miss Lunsford’s procedure, anatomically linking two organisms, had a name by then—parabiosis. But while this wasn’t the first time it had been performed, her explorations were among the first to use parabiosis to study aging.

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In the words of Gibson: “In contrast to our first study . . . we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten.”8 Although this was also a small study, another larger one published later on confirmed the findings. How do we explain this unexpected result? This is where the science gets interesting. It could be that people expected to feel worse on the study’s diets, so they did—a phenomenon called the “nocebo” effect, a wordplay on the placebo effect. After all, they did have to pay close attention to how their tummies felt, which alone might entail some psychosomatic response. Moreover, it’s been suggested that gluten may be the wrong villain and that these other potential triggers, especially the FODMAPs, are to blame. These ingredients often travel with gluten.

Overdiagnosed: Making People Sick in the Pursuit of Health
by H. Gilbert Welch , Lisa M. Schwartz and Steven Woloshin
Published 18 Jan 2011

First, some people feel better just because they do something. That is the placebo effect: people sometimes experience a benefit even when they take an inert sugar pill or when they receive a faked surgery. Second, some symptoms, by their very nature, wax and wane spontaneously. People with back pain know this quite well; on some days, their backs feel great, on other days, they feel awful. These two factors can lead people to judge an intervention as beneficial when in fact what is really happening is either a placebo effect or a spontaneous improvement. Consequently, the most trustworthy test of an intervention for current symptoms is still a randomized trial—a true experiment in which people are randomly given the drug or a placebo and then undergo a standardized symptom assessment.

The Art of Statistics: Learning From Data
by David Spiegelhalter
Published 14 Oct 2019

The correlation was −0.60, and some theory shows that if the rankings were complete chance and all that was operating were regression-to-the-mean, the correlation would be expected to be −0.71, not very different from what was observed.4 This suggests the differences between countries were far less than claimed, and that changes in league position had little to do with changes in teaching philosophy. Regression-to-the-mean also operates in clinical trials. In the last chapter we saw that randomized trials were needed to evaluate new pharmaceuticals properly, since even people in the control arm showed benefit – the so-called placebo effect. This is often interpreted to mean that just taking a sugar pill (preferably a red one) actually has a beneficial effect on people’s health. But much of the improvement seen in people who do not receive any active treatment may be regression-to-the-mean, since patients are enrolled in trials when they are showing symptoms, and many of these would have resolved anyway.

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Locators in italics refer to figures and tables A A/B tests 107 absolute risk 31–2, 36–7, 383 adjustment 110, 133, 135, 383 adjuvant therapy 181–5, 183–4 agricultural experiments 105–6 AI (artificial intelligence) 144–5, 185–6, 383 alcohol consumption 112–13, 299–300 aleatory uncertainty 240, 306, 383 algorithms – accuracy 163–7 – biases 179 – for classification 143–4, 148 – complex 174–7 – contests 148, 156, 175, 277–8 see also Titanic challenge – meaning of 383 – parameters 171 – performance assessment 156–63, 176, 177 – for prediction 144, 148 – robustness 178 – sensitivity 157 – specificity 157 – and statistical variability 178–9 – transparency 179–81 allocation bias 85 analysis 6–12, 15 apophenia 97, 257 Arbuthnot, John 253–5 Archbishop of Canterbury 322–3 arm-crossing behaviour 259–62, 260, 263, 268–70, 269 artificial intelligence (AI) 144–5, 185–6, 383 ascertainment bias 96, 383 assessment of statistical claims 368–71 associations 109–14, 138 autism 113 averages 46–8, 383 B bacon sandwiches 31–4 bar charts 28, 30 Bayes, Thomas 305 Bayes factors 331–2, 333, 384 Bayes’ Theorem 307, 313, 315–16, 384 Bayesian hypothesis testing 219, 305–38 Bayesian learning 331 Bayesian smoothing 330 Bayesian statistical inference 323–34, 325, 384 beauty 179 bell-shaped curves 85–91, 87 Bem, Daryl 341, 358–9 Bernoulli distribution 237, 384 best-fit lines 125, 393 biases 85, 179 bias/variance trade-off 169–70, 384 big data 145–6, 384 binary data 22, 385 binary variables 27 binomial distribution 230–6, 232, 235, 385 birth weight 85–91 blinding 101, 385 BMI (body mass index) 28 body mass index (BMI) 28 Bonferroni correction 280, 290–1, 385 boosting 172 bootstrapping 195–203, 196, 198, 200, 202, 208, 229–30, 386 bowel cancer 233–6, 235 Box, George 139 box-and-whisker plots 42, 43, 44, 45 Bradford-Hill, Austin 114 Bradford-Hill criteria 114–17 brain tumours 95–6, 135, 301–3 breast cancer screening 214–16, 215 breast cancer surgery 181–5, 183–4 Brier score 164–7, 386 Bristol Royal Infirmary 19–21, 56–8 C Cairo, Alberto 25, 65 calibration 161–3, 162, 386 Cambridge University 110, 111 cancer – breast 181–5, 183–4, 214–16, 215 – lung 98, 114, 266 – ovarian 361 – risk of 31–6 carbonated soft drinks 113 Cardiac Surgical Registry (CSR) 20–1 case-control studies 109, 386 categorical variables 27–8, 386 causation 96–9, 114–17, 128 reverse causation 112–15, 404 Central Limit Theorem 199, 238–9, 386–7 chance 218, 226 child heart surgery see heart surgery chi-squared goodness-of-fittest 271, 272, 387 chi-squared test of association 268–70, 387 chocolate 348 classical probability 217 classification 143–4, 148–54 classification trees 154–6, 155, 168, 174, 387 cleromancy 81 clinical trials 82–3, 99–107, 131, 280, 347 clustering 147 cohort studies 109, 387 coins 308, 309 communication 66–9, 353, 354, 364–5 complex algorithms 138–9 complexity parameters 171 computer simulation 205–7, 208 conclusions 15, 22, 347 conditional probability 214–16 confidence intervals 241–4, 243, 248–51, 250, 271–3, 335–6, 387–8 confirmatory studies 350–1, 388 confounders 110, 135, 388 confusion matrixes 157 continuous variables 46, 388 control groups 100, 389 control limits 234, 389 correlation 96–7, 113 count variables 44–6, 389 counterfactuals 97–8, 389 crime 83–5, 321–2 see also homicides Crime Survey for England and Wales 83–5 cross-sectional studies 108–9 cross-validation 170–1, 389 CSR(Cardiac Surgical Registry) 20–1 D Data 7–12, 15, 22 data collection 345 data distribution see sample distribution data ethics 371 data literacy 12, 389 data science 11, 145–6, 389 data summaries 40 data visualization 22, 25, 65–6, 69 data-dredging 12 death 9 see also mortality; murder; survival rates deduction 76 deep learning 147, 389 dependent events 214, 389 dependent variables 60, 125–6, 389 deterministic models 128–9, 138 dice 205–7, 206, 213 differences between groups of numbers 51–6 distribution 43 DNA evidence 216 dogs 179 Doll, Richard 114 doping 310–13, 311–12, 314, 315–16 dot-diagrams 42, 43, 44, 45 dynamic graphics 71 E Ears 108–9 education 95–6, 106–7, 131, 135, 178–9 election result predictions 372–6, 375 see also opinion polls empirical distribution 197, 404 enumerative probability 217–18 epidemiology 95, 117, 389 epistemic uncertainty 240, 306, 308, 309, 390 error matrixes 157, 158, 390 errors in coding 345–6 ESP (extra-sensory perception) 341, 358–9 ethics 371 eugenics 39 expectation 231, 390 expected frequencies 32, 209–13, 211, 214–16, 215, 390 explanatory variables 126, 132–5 exploratory studies 350, 390 exposures 114, 390 external validity 82–3, 390 extra-sensory perception (ESP) 341, 358–9 F False discovery rate 280, 390 false-positives 278–80, 390 feature engineering 147, 390 Fermat, Pierre de 207 final odds 316 financial crisis of 2007–2008 139–40 financial models 139–40 Fisher, Ronald 258, 265–6, 336, 345 five-sigma results 281–2 forensic epidemiology 117, 391 forensic statistics 6 framing 391 – of numbers 24–5 – of questions 79–80 fraud 347–50 funnel plots 234, 391 G Gallup, George 81 Galton, Francis 39–40, 58, 121–2, 238–9 gambler’s fallacy 237 gambling 205–7, 206, 213 garden of forking paths 350 Gaussian distribution see normal distribution GDP (Gross Domestic Product) 8–9 gender discrimination 110, 111 Gini index 49 Gombaud, Antoine 205–7 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) 8–9 Groucho principle 358 H Happiness 9 HARKing 351–2 hazard ratios 357, 391 health 169–70 heart attacks 99–104 Heart Protection Study (HPS) 100–2, 103, 273–5, 274, 282–7 heart surgery 19–21, 22–4, 23, 56–8, 57, 93, 136–8, 137 heights 122–5, 123, 124, 127, 134, 201, 202, 243, 275–8, 276 hernia surgery 106 HES (Hospital Episode Statistics) 20–1 hierarchical modelling 328, 391 Higgs bosons 281–2 histograms 42, 43, 44, 45 homicides 1–6, 222–6, 225, 248, 270–1, 272, 287–94 Hospital Episode Statistics (HES) 20–1 hospitals 19–21, 25–7, 26, 56–61, 138 house prices 48, 112–14 HPS (Heart Protection Study) 100–2, 103, 273–5, 274, 282–7 hypergeometric distribution 264, 391 hypotheses 256–7 hypothesis testing 253–303, 336, 392 see also Neyman-Pearson Theory; null hypothesis significance testing; P-values I IARC (International Agency for Research in Cancer) 31 icon arrays 32–4, 33, 392 income 47–8 independent events 214, 392 independent variables 60, 126, 392 induction 76–7, 392 inductive behaviour 283 inductive inference 76–83, 78, 239, 392 infographics 69, 70 insurance 180 ‘intention to treat’ principle 100–1, 392 interactions 172, 392 internal validity 80–1, 392 International Agency for Research in Cancer (IARC) 31 inter-quartile range (IQR) 51, 89, 392 IQ 349 IQR (inter-quartile range) 49, 51, 89, 392 J Jelly beans in a jar 40–6, 48, 49, 50 K Kaggle contests 148, 156, 175, 277–8 see also Titanic challenge k-nearest neighbors algorithm 175 L LASSO 172–4 Law of Large Numbers 237, 393 law of the transposed conditional 216, 313 league tables 25, 130–1 see also tables least-squares regression lines 124, 125, 393 left-handedness 113–14, 229–33, 232 legal cases 313, 321, 331–2 likelihood 327, 336, 394 likelihood ratios 314–23, 319–20, 332, 394 line graphs 4, 5 linear models 132, 138 literal populations 91–2 logarithmic scale 44, 45, 394 logistic regression 136, 172, 173, 394 London Underground 24 loneliness 80 long-run frequency probability 218 look elsewhere effect 282 lung cancer 98, 114, 266 lurking factors 113, 135, 394–5 M Machine learning 139, 144–5, 395 mammography 214–16, 215 margins of error 189, 199, 200, 244–8, 395 mean average 46–8 mean squared error (MSE) 163–4, 165, 395 measurement 77–9 meat 31–4 media 356–8 median average 46, 47–8, 51, 89, 395 Méré, Chevalier de 205–7, 213 meta-analysis 102, 104, 395 metaphorical populations 92–3 mode 46, 48, 395 mortality 47, 113–14 MRP (multilevel regression and post-stratification) 329, 396 MSE (mean squared error) 163–4, 165, 395 mu 190 multilevel regression and post-stratification (MRP) 329, 396 multiple linear regression 132–3, 134 multiple regression 135, 136, 396 multiple testing 278–80, 290, 396 murders 1–6, 222–6, 225, 248, 270–1, 287–94 N Names, popularity of 66, 67 National Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyle Survey (Natsal) 52, 69, 70, 73–5 natural variability 226 neural networks 174 Neyman, Jerzy 242, 283, 335–6 Neyman-Pearson Theory 282–7, 336–7 NHST (null hypothesis significance testing) 266–71, 294–7, 296 non-significant results 299, 346–7, 370 normal distribution 85–91, 87, 226, 237–9, 396–7 null hypotheses 257–65, 336, 397 null hypothesis significance testing (NHST) 266–71, 294–7, 296 O Objective priors 327 observational data 108, 114–17, 128 odds 34, 314, 316 odds ratios 34–6 one-sided tests 264, 397–8 one-tailed P-values 264, 398 opinion polls 82, 245–7, 246, 328–9 see also election result predictions ovarian cancer 361 over-fitting 167–71, 168 P P-hacking 351 P-values 264–5, 283, 285, 294–303, 336, 401 parameters 88, 240, 398 Pascal, Blaise 207 patterns 146–7 Pearson, Egon 242, 283, 336 Pearson, Karl 58 Pearson correlation coefficient 58, 59, 96–7, 126, 398 percentiles 48, 89, 398–9 performance assessment of algorithms 156–67, 176, 177 permutation tests 261–4, 263, 399 personal probability 218–19 pie charts 28, 29 placebo effect 131 placebos 100, 101, 399 planning 13–15, 344–5 Poisson distribution 223–4, 225, 270–1, 399 poker 322–3 policing 107 popes 114 population distribution 86–91, 195, 399 population growth 61–6, 62–4 population mean 190–1, 395 see also expectation populations 74–5, 80–93, 399 posterior distributions 327, 400 power of a test 285–6, 400 PPDAC (Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis, Conclusion) problem-solving cycle 13–15, 14, 108–9, 148–54, 344–8, 372–6, 400 practical significance 302, 400 prayer 107 precognition 341, 358–9 Predict 2.1 182 prediction 144, 148–54 predictive analytics 144, 400 predictor variables 392 pre-election polls see opinion polls presentation 22–7 press offices 355–6 priming 80 prior distributions 327, 400 prior odds 316 probabilistic forecasts 161, 400 probabilities, accuracy 163–7 probability 10 meaning of 216–22, 400–1 rules of 210–13 and uncertainty 306–7 probability distribution 90, 401 probability theory 205–27, 268–71 probability trees 210–13, 212 probation decisions 180 Problem, Plan, Data, Analysis, Conclusion (PPDAC) problem-solving cycle 13–15, 14, 108–9, 148–54, 344–8, 372–6, 400 problems 13 processed meat 31–4 propensity 218 proportions, comparisons 28–37, 33, 35 prosecutor’s fallacy 216, 313 prospective cohort studies 109, 401 pseudo-random-number generators 219 publication bias 367–8 publication of findings 355 Q QRPs (questionable research practices) 350–3 quartiles 89, 402 questionable research practices (QRPs) 350–3 Quetelet, Adolphe 226 R Race 179 random forests 174 random match probability 321, 402 random observations 219 random sampling 81–2, 208, 220–2 random variables 221, 229, 402 randomization 108, 266 randomization tests 261–4, 263, 399 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) 100–2, 105–7, 114, 135, 402 randomizing devices 219, 220–1 range 49, 402 rate ratios 357, 402 Receiver Operating Characteristic (ROC) curves 157–60, 160, 402 recidivism algorithms 179–80 regression 121–40 regression analysis 125–8, 127 regression coefficients 126, 133, 403 regression modelling strategies 138–40 regression models 171–4 regression to the mean 125, 129–32, 403 regularization 170 relative risk 31, 403 reliability of data 77–9 replication crisis in science 11–12 representative sampling 82 reproducibility crisis 11–12, 297, 342–7, 403 researcher degrees of freedom 350–1 residual errors 129, 403 residuals 122–5, 403 response variables 126, 135–8 retrospective cohort studies 109, 403 reverse causation 112–15, 404 Richard III 316–21 risk, expression of 34 robust measures 51 ROC (Receiver Operating Characteristic) curves 157–60, 160, 402 Rosling, Hans 71 Royal Statistical Society 68, 79 rules for effective statistical practice 379–80 Ryanair 79 S Salmon 279 sample distribution 43 sample mean 190–1, 395 sample size 191, 192–5, 193–4, 283–7 sampling 81–2, 93 sampling distributions 197, 404 scatter-plots 2–4, 3 scientific research 11–12 selective reporting 12, 347 sensitivity 157–60, 404 sentencing 180 Sequential Probability Ratio Test (SPRT) 292, 293 sequential testing 291–2, 404 sex ratio 253–5, 254, 261, 265 sexual partners 47, 51–6, 53, 55, 73–5, 191–201, 193–4, 196, 198, 200 Shipman, Harold 1–6, 287–94, 289, 293 shoe sizes 49 shrinkage 327, 404 sigma 190, 281–2 signal and the noise 129, 404 significance testing see null hypothesis significance testing Silver, Nate 27 Simonsohn, Uri 349–52, 366 Simpson’s Paradox 111, 112, 405 size of a test 285–6, 405 skewed distribution 43, 405 smoking 98, 114, 266 social acceptability bias 74 social physics 226 Somerton, Francis see Titanic challenge sortilege 81 sortition 81 Spearman’s rank correlation 58–60, 405 specificity 157–9, 405 speed cameras 130, 131–2 speed of light 247 sports doping 310–13, 311–12, 314, 315–16 sports teams 130–1 spread 49–51 SPRT (Sequential Probability Ratio Test) 292, 293 standard deviation 49, 88, 126, 405 standard error 231, 405–6 statins 36–7, 99–104, 273–5, 274, 282–7 statistical analysis 6–12, 15 statistical inference 208, 219, 229–51, 305–38, 323–8, 335, 404 statistical methods 12, 346–7, 379 statistical models 121, 128–9, 404 statistical practice 365–7 statistical science 2, 7, 404 statistical significance 255, 265–8, 270–82, 404 Statistical Society 68 statistics – assessment of claims 368–71 – as a discipline 10–11 – ideology 334–8 – improvements 362–4 – meaning of 404 – publications 16 – rules for effective practice 379–80 – teaching of 13–15 STEP (Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer) 107 storytelling 69–71 stratification 110, 383 Streptomycin clinical trial 105, 114 strip-charts 42, 43, 44, 45 strokes 99–104 Student’s t-statistic 275–7 Study of the Therapeutic Effects of Intercessory Prayer (STEP) 107 subjective probability 218–19 summaries 40, 49, 50, 51 supermarkets 112–14 supervised learning 143–4, 404 support-vector machines 174 surgery – breast cancer surgery 181–5, 183–4 – heart surgery 19–21, 22–4, 23, 56–8, 57, 93, 136–8, 137 – hernia surgery 106 survival rates 25–7, 26, 56–61, 57, 60–1 systematic reviews 102–4 T T-statistic 275–7, 404 tables 22–7, 23 tail-area 231 tea tasting 266 teachers 178–9 teaching of statistics 13–15 technology 1 telephone polls 82 Titanic challenge 148–56, 150, 152–3, 155, 162, 166–7, 172, 173, 175, 176, 177, 277 transposed conditionals, law of 216, 313 trees 7–8 trends 61–6, 62–4, 67 two-sided tests 265, 397–8 two-tailed P-values 265, 398 Type I errors 283–5, 404 Type II errors 283–5, 407 U Uncertainty 208, 240, 306–7, 383, 390 uncertainty intervals 199, 200, 241, 335 unemployment 8–9, 189–91, 271–3 university education 95–6, 135, 301–3 see also Cambridge University unsupervised learning 147, 407 US Presidents 167–9 V Vaccination 113 validity of data 79–83 variability 10, 49–51, 178–9, 407 variables 27, 56–61 variance 49, 407 Vietnam War draft lottery 81–2 violence 113 virtual populations 92 volunteer bias 85 voting age 79–80 W Waitrose 112–14 weather forecasts 161, 164, 165 weight loss 348 ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’ 351–2 wisdom of crowds 39–40, 48, 51, 407 Z Z-scores 89, 407 PELICAN BOOKS Economics: The User’s Guide Ha-Joon Chang Human Evolution Robin Dunbar Revolutionary Russia: 1891–1991 Orlando Figes The Domesticated Brain Bruce Hood Greek and Roman Political Ideas Melissa Lane Classical Literature Richard Jenkyns Who Governs Britain?

Green Swans: The Coming Boom in Regenerative Capitalism
by John Elkington
Published 6 Apr 2020

But these are exceptions in a storyline that more typically sees change operating on the basis of too little, too late. Indeed, one key reason why I decided to announce that product recall for the triple bottom line was that I concluded that, at least in the context of the so-called wicked and super wicked problems haunting today’s world, the concept was suffering from what we might call the Placebo Effect. Let me explain. Every now and then you see or hear something that crystallizes a thought that has been nagging at your brain. That was my experience when I downloaded a CNN article that asked a simple question: Have you ever pressed the pedestrian button at a crosswalk and wondered if it really worked?

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Most CEOs talk about their organization’s commitment to a wide range of philanthropic, employee engagement, and other benevolent activities at almost every possible opportunity.”13 All well and good, but O’Donohoe, an investor who has advised the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, concluded, “As long as CSR stays fundamentally altruistic in its motivation it is unlikely ever to be considered as being core to business and is unlikely ever to scale or to provide lasting solutions to critical social challenges.” So, yes, we see placebo effects at work. But, on the other hand, and to the same original question, no—at least in the sense that momentous progress has been made since I began work in this space. Back then it was almost impossible to get companies to talk to outsiders about ethical, social, and environmental issues. When we set up Environmental Data Services (ENDS) in 1978, it took us nine months to get inside the first company—even though our parent company was highly respected in the world of industrial relations.

May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases—And What We Can Do About It
by Alex Edmans
Published 13 May 2024

Why something is better than nothing RCTs are the gold standard in showing causation, and the methodology has evolved further since Lind’s time. The one weakness in Lind’s study is that even causation might not be enough to move from data to evidence. Even if citrus fruits cause a recovery, there could still be alternative explanations as to why. It might not be due to their nutritional content but a placebo effect. Those given the oranges and lemons might have believed they’d be cured, because citrus fruits seemed the most plausible of all the remedies, and it was this psychological effect that made them better. In contrast, those prescribed sulphuric acid thought they’d drawn the short straw and were doomed to death.

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Anders 61, 62–3, 66, 104 errors of commission 250 errors of omission 250 estimation 246 evaluation 223, 233 evidence 5, 12, 13, 122 average results 280, 282 credentials 226–8 identity and 266 is not proof 192–210 scientific management 198–9 lack of 219 limitations of 280, 282 smarter thinking 288–9 in social sciences 224 systematic reviews 222 testing 217–18 validity 199 EXCOMM 237–8, 244, 254 cognitive diversity 238–9, 240 deliberation process 244–5 demographic make up 238 executive pay 67–9 exogenous parts of instruments 178–9, 179–80, 182, 190 experts 223–4 explained components of instruments 178–9 explorers 170, 171–2 external validity 199, 202, 204, 209 Fabo et al. 225–6 Facebook 272 Fact Check (Reuters) 270 fact-checking websites 270–71, 277, 282 facts 12, 13 are not data 89–114 learning from a blank slate 108–13 narrative fallacy 104–8, 113 seeing the full picture 95–104 selected samples 95–6, 102, 113 Steve Jobs and Apple 89, 90–92, 93, 94, 101–2, 103, 106, 107, 200 checking 7–8, 12, 21, 37, 85, 88, 103, 268–9 interpretation of 24 smarter thinking 285–6 failure parties 250 failures 250–51 fake news 271, 272, 282 Faleye, Olubunmi 4 family businesses 181–2 Fancy, Tariq 83–5, 226 fast-food employment 184–5 Fernbach, Philip 251 ‘Fifty shades of QE’ (Fabo et al.) 225–6 Financial Management Association 270 Financial Reporting Council 74 fintech companies 85–6 Fisher, Matthew 54 Fixit (fictional company) 119, 135–40, 137–40 data mining see data mining see also Xinyi (fictional name) Flammer, Caroline 243 flexibility 108 Flint, Austin 174–5 Floyd, George 75 Fong, Geoffrey 262 Fooled by Randomness (Taleb) 274 football 126–7, 188 decline in stock markets 134–5 Euros (2004) 126–7 mood and emotions 126–7, 128, 129 sentiment 129 World Cup (2014) 133–4 Forbes 219 Forbes 15 Best Business Books (2015) 268–9 Ford, Henry 245 Fortune 60, 219, 223 Fos, Slava 241 frequent trading 97–101 Frontiers in Nutrition study 144, 145 Full Fact 270 Galileo Galilei 226 Gallagher, Liam 44 Gama, Vasco da 171 García, Diego 129 Gavin, Jim 23 gender diversity 243 company performance research 118–24, 135–40 data mining see data mining evidence for fund launch 116–18 geoengineering 268 Getting Things Done (Allen) 229, 270 Gibson, Belle 17–20, 103–4 Gimbel, Sarah 28–9 Gladwell, Malcolm 6, 60, 66 Ericsson study 61, 62–3, 66, 104 magazine interview 60, 61, 63 10,000-hours rule 6, 59–61, 62–6 Global Head of Sustainability Research 85 global warming 265–6 Glossner, Simon 243 Golden Circle Model 92 Google 157, 255 Gore, Al 266 gradients 136–7 Grant Thornton 224 Grant Thornton Corporate Governance Index 225 granular world 45, 51–2, 56, 201 Great North Run 47 Gresham College 62, 264 grit 204–5, 207 group discussions 247–8 grouping 137–40, 140, 141 groupthink 236, 237, 241, 247–8, 257 growth mindset 62 Guardian, The 215 Guriev, Sergei 271–2 Guzey, Alexey 270 Halo Effect, The (Rosenzweig) 111 Harris, Sam 28–9 Harvard Business Review 103, 152, 154, 290–91 Harvard University 228 Heeb, Florian 54 Henry, Emeric 271–2 hierarchies 249–50 high pollution 150–51 Holmes, Elizabeth 20–21, 219 homeopathy 6 honorary doctorates 227 Hoxby, Caroline 169, 177–9, 202, 221 HSBC 256 Hughes, Robert 22 Hung, William 207 hunter gatherers 43–4 hydroxychloroquine 6–7 Hypocritical Oath 230 hypotheses 23–5, 66 average output 99 control samples 99, 102 inputs and outputs 98–9 magnitude of underperformance 100 representative samples 99, 102 reverse engineering 124–5 sample size 100 statistical significance 100–101 test samples 99 identity 266 Imperial Tobacco 152 inclusion 243–8 micro-processes 248–9 An Inconvenient Truth 265, 266 inequality 159–61, 162–3 information gathering 214 InfoWars 231 initial beliefs 216 instruments 177–8, 190 endogenous parts 178–9, 180, 182 exogenous parts 178–9, 179–80, 182, 190 natural experiments and 186 relevance 179, 180, 182, 190 ridiculousness and irrelevance 180–81 interaction effect 207 internal validity 199, 200, 202, 209 intervention studies 173 investors 127 Ioannidis, John 219 iPhone 91, 92 IQ (intelligence quotient) 143–4, 145–7 irrelevance of instruments 180–81 Isaacson, Walter 93, 101–2, 103 James (acrobat) 59–60 Jandali, Abdulfattah 89 Janis, Irving 236 Jensen, Michael 69, 70–71 Jobs, Clara 90 Jobs, Paul 89–90 Jobs, Steve 89, 90–92, 93, 101–2, 103, 106 Johnson, Tim 127–8 Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) 236, 237, 239, 240 Journal of Finance 129, 218 Journal of the American Medical Association 219 journal quality 218 journalists 228, 282 checking facts 273 journals impact factor 220 peer-reviews of 217–18 publication bias 220 Joy, Bill 61 Kahan, Dan 263, 266, 268 Kahneman, Daniel 29 Kaplan, Jonas 28–9 Keil, Frank 54, 251 Kempf, Elisabeth 241 Kennedy, General Robert 244, 245 Kennedy, President John F. 244 Bay of Pigs invasion 235–7, 244 Cuban Missile Crisis 235, 237–8, 239–40, 244–5 EXCOMM 238–9, 244–6 Kerry, John 29–30 Khrushchev, Nikita 235, 237, 240 Kirk, Stuart 256–7 knowledge 7–8, 10 biased interpretation 37 biased search 36–7 Krantz, David 262 Krueger, Alan 184–5 Krueger, Joachim 52 Ladder of Misinference 11, 56, 152, 232 Lancet 221 Lancet Public Health study 46 Langley, Samuel Pierpont 200 law of attraction 20 Leavers (Brexit) 214 LeMay, Curtis 239, 240 Lemnitzer, Lyman 239 Lepper, Mark 30–31, 259, 260, 261 Les Décodeurs 270 lies 12 limbic brain 93, 107 Lind, James 172–3, 174 LinkedIn post 153 Lisker, Bruce 21–3, 24 Lisker, Dorka 21–2 Living Wage 76–7 Lodge, Milton 36–7 London Business School 74–5 London Marathon 47 Lord, Charles 30–31, 259, 260, 261 Macintosh 91 marbled world 45, 53–5, 56 Martin, Roger L. 290–92 McDaniel, Mark 48 McGrath Task Circumplex 240 McKinsey 225 report (2020) 78 study (2017) 152, 154, 187, 291–2 McLaughlin, Dan 64–5 McNamara, Robert 239–40, 244 Mearsheimer, John 86 Meckling, William 69, 70–71 Medium 84 Medscape 219 Merton College 213 Merton in the City reunion (2016) 213–14 metal cutting 193–4 micro-processes 248–9, 258, 263 Midvale Steel Works 193 Miliband, Ed 160, 161 minimum wage laws 183–4 misinformation 5–7, 9–10, 67–8, 214, 230, 231, 234 misrepresentation 74–6 MIT 125, 126, 127 moderate world 45–50, 55 moderation 206–7, 209–10 momentum 157 Monsue, Andrew 22–3, 24 Montessori education method 263 Morgan Stanley 125, 130–31, 189, 255–6 ‘balanceworks’ programme 156 motivated reasoning 27–8, 30, 37, 184 Motor Neurone Disease Association 47 Mountain View (later Silicon Valley) 90 Mozart 61 Mullainathan, Sendhil 175–6 Murdoch, Lachlan 181 Murdoch, Rupert 20, 181 my-side reasons 264 naïve acceptance 25–7, 32, 37–8 narrative fallacy 105–8, 109, 113 twin biases 106 National Childbirth Trust (NCT) 143, 144–5 National Geographic 223 National Health and Medical Research Council 222 National Health Service (NHS) website 222 National Security Council (NSC) 237 National Union of Journalists 273 NATO 86 natural experiments 185–6, 187, 190 instruments and 186 Nature 6, 218 neocortex 92, 107 New Scientist 223 News Corporation 181 news feeds 6 Nisbett, Richard 262 No Child Left Behind Act (2001) 196–7 non-pecuniary benefits 70–71 Norli, Øyvind 129 Nyhan, Brendan 270 Obama, Barack 265 Object-Spatial Imagery and Verbal Questionnaire 240, 241 observational studies 173 Odean, Terry 96–8 oil spills 25–8 100 Best Companies to Work for 116–17, 156–7, 189 opinions, articulating in detail 251 Organization Stream Analysis 111 organizations 235–58 Oster, Emily 147, 201, 222 other-side reasons 264 out-of-sample tests 133 Outliers 61, 64, 104, 270 over-extrapolation 206–7, 209–10 Pagella Politica 270 Paige, Rod 196, 199 Paine, Lynn 290–91 Palin, Sarah 81 papers, scientific retractions 221 reviewed by scientists 220–21 submitted for review 217–18 parachutes 208–9 Paris Agreement (2015) 49, 50 pausing before criticizing 232–3 pausing before sharing 230–32 pay gaps 3–4, 5 Peak (Ericsson) 63, 104 peer reviewers 8 peer reviews 217–19, 233 books 223 reliability of 220 Pennycook, Gordon 231, 272 Perkins, David 264 Ph.D.s 227 Phillips et al. 242 Pickett, Kate 160–61, 162–3 The Spirit Level 159–60, 161, 163, 165, 200, 225, 270 pig-iron handling 194–5 Pixar 91, 250–51 placebo effect 174–5 PolitiFact 81, 270, 271 Pollock, Joycelyn 24–5 population density 151 Porras, Jerry 110–12 positive correlation 165 post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy 164–5 post-mortem 255 poverty 160–61 power distance 249 power posing 221 Power, Thomas 239 PowerPoint 251–2 pre-mortem 255 precision 170–73 predictions 151, 152, 154, 167 Presence (Cuddy) 269, 270, 274 Preston, Elizabeth 259, 260, 261 Principles of Scientific Management, The (Taylor) 195 processing power 248–52 productivity 193–4 professorship 227 proof 198–9 Psychological Science 221, 269, 270 psychometric tests 108–9 publication bias 220 publication process 273–4 endorsements 274–5 quantitative easing 226 Quest, Richard 133–4 Quote Investigator 270 racial discrimination 175–6 Rambotti, Simone 161 random events 107 randomized control trials (RCTs) 173, 174–6, 189–90 instruments 177–8 limitations of 177 parachute experiment 208–9 randomness 170–73 range of values 206, 207–8 Raquel, Ronald 23 Rassemblement National 271–2 Reading Football Club 159 reasoning 264–5 red teams 254–5 reducing hierarchies 249–50 regression 136–7, 139, 140, 158, 161–2 common causes 158–9 regression coefficient 136 regulation 123 Reifler, Jason 270 Reis, Ebru 4 relevance of instruments 179, 180, 182, 190 Remainers (Brexit) 213, 214 replication studies 221 representative samples 96, 99, 102 research 4–5 best practice 273 boardroom diversity 74–5 confirming opinions 5 data mining 119–20 diversity 117–19 gender diversity see gender diversity open access 35 rigour 8, 117–19 sources 5–6 unvetted 218 research qualifications 226–7 resilient companies 78 Responsible Investment Advisory Committee 248–9 Retraction Watch 269, 270 Reuters 79 reverse causation 164–5, 167, 170, 187 reverse engineering 94, 107–8 review papers 222 Reyes the Entrepreneur 95, 97 rhetoric 215 rheumatism experiment 174 Rice-Davies, Mandy 76–7, 226 ridiculousness of instruments 180–81 Rogers, David 47, 207 Rosenzweig, Phil 111 Ross, Lee 30–31, 259 Rossmo, Kim 24–5 Rothschild, Jesse 221–2 Royal London Asset Management 248 Rozenblit, Leonid 251 Rozin, Paul 51–2 rules 66 Rusk, Dean 240, 244 sailors 170–72 Sainsbury’s 76–7 sample mining 131–3, 141 defending against 133–5 sample size 100 San Francisco Business Times 219 Sanders, Bernie 82 scaffolding 264–5, 281 Schieble, Joanne 89 Scholar’s Mate 32–3 school curriculum 196 schools choice of 169 collective learning 169 competition between 168–9 Schultz, George 20 scientific consensus 222, 233 scientific culture 253–5, 258 scientific curiosity 263 scientific intelligence 263 scientific journals 134 debunking studies 221 papers for review 217–18 scientific management in education 195–7 failure of 198–9 in manufacturing 195 scientific method 24, 25, 98–101, 102–3, 124 scientists 220–21 Scott, Willard 53 scurvy 170–72 citrus fruits 173 endogenous remedy 172 exogenous remedy 172, 173 Select Committee on Business 3–5 CEOs’s executive pay report 67–9 selected samples 95, 99, 102, 109–10, 111 self-help books 229 self-interest 215 semiconductors 53–4 ShareAction 76–7 shareholder returns 120–21 shareholder value 69, 70–71, 71, 85, 86 sharing information 230–32 shoulders of giants 217–18 shovelling technique (Taylor) 194 significance level 100 silent majority 247 silent starts 246, 251–2, 257 Silicon Valley Bank 28 Silicon Valley Business Journal 219 Sinek, Simon 69, 71, 93, 94, 107, 200, 229 sleep 71–3 Sloan, Alfred 254 smarter thinking see thinking smarter smoking 163–4, 202 Snowdon, Christopher 161 social distancing 75–6 social diversity 241–2 social media 10, 230–31, 231, 282 Soeters, Joseph 249 soldiering 193 Spirit Level Delusion, The (Snowdon) 161 Spirit Level, The (Pickett and Wilkinson) 159–60, 161, 163, 165, 200, 225, 270 sports impact on stock market 126–9, 134 mood and emotions 128–9 spurious correlations 122, 127, 141 St Paul’s 159 Start with Why (Sinek) 93, 270 statements 13, 59–88 accepted as facts 12 are not facts 87–8 death panel episode 80–81 inaccuracy 59–63 misrepresentation 74–6 choosing words carefully 71–5 lack of sources 81–2 misportrayal 69–71 misrepresentation 74–6 smarter thinking 283–5 that can never be facts 82–8 examining evidence 84–6, 88 exploring alternative explanations 86 twin biases 83–4 verifying as facts 73 statistical literacy 262–3, 264, 281 statistical significance 100–101, 120, 122, 137 statistics 161 Bayesian inference 23–4 Staw, Barry 107–8, 166 stock market 95–7 brokers 96–8 frequent trading 97–101 sentiment 127, 128 sport, impact on 126–9, 134 traders 96–8, 125–6, 128 trading floor 125–6 stories 104–5, 108 Strange, Angela 85–6 striatum 30 Sun Tzu 11 Sunday Times Rich List 108 superlatives 85, 86 survey papers 222 sustainability 8–9, 215, 267 sustainable investments 54, 83–5 System 1 thought process 29 System 2 thought process 29 systematic reviews 222, 233 Taber, Charles 36–7 Taleb, Nassim 106, 274 targets 49–50 Taylor, Frederick Winslow 192–4 Taylor, General Maxwell 237 tech industry 157 TED 9, 205–6 Telegraph, The 215 10,000-hours rule 6, 64, 66, 104 chasing dreams 64–6 claim 59–61 disheartening 66 evidence 62–3 Tesla 152 test groups 139 natural experiments 185–6 randomized control trials (RCTs) 174–5, 177 test samples 99 theory of everything 199, 200, 204 Theranos 20–21, 219, 226 Thinking, Fast and Slow (Kahneman) 29 thinking smarter data 286–8 evidence 288–9 example of 290–92 facts 285–6 individuals 213–34 organizations 235–58 preliminaries 283 shortcuts 289 societies 259–82 statements 283–5 studies 289–90 Thirteen Days: A Memoir of the Cuban Missile Crisis (Kennedy) 244 Thomson Reuters 132 TikTok 20 time-series studies 30, 31 tolerating failure 250–51 Tolstoy, Leo 216–17 Tonight Show, The 40 traders 96–8, 125–6, 128 Trades Union Congress (TUC) 4–5 traits 149–50, 166 Trevithick, Richard 171 Trouble with Europe, The (Bootle) 213–14 Trump, Donald 6–7, 271 trust 153 Trust across America 153 trustworthy companies 153 truth 12, 13, 21–6 Tsoutsoura, Margarita 241 twin biases 56, 66–7, 73, 83–4, 106, 199 Twitter (later X) 230–31 2-4-6 brainteaser 33, 260, 261 UBS 250 unexplained components of instruments 178–9 United States of America (USA) death panels 80–81 healthcare 80–81 universal statements 85 universality 199, 201 unnatural experiments 186–7 US Military Academy 202–3 USSR 235, 244 see also Cuban Missile Crisis vaccination 267–8 Venkateswaran, Anand 4 verification 220 Vigen, Tyler 122 Vioxx 220 Vogue diet 40 Vogue magazine 40 voluntary choice inputs 149, 166 voting 247 Wakefield, Andrew 221 Walker, Matthew 71–3 Wall Street Journal 84, 219 Wason, Peter 33, 260, 261 water intoxication 47 weight loss 40–41 Welch, Jack 71, 85, 86 West Point 202–3, 204, 206 The Whole Pantry app 17–18 Whole Pantry, The 18, 273 Why We Sleep (Walker) 71–3, 270 Wikipedia 200 Wilkinson, Richard 160–61, 162–3 The Spirit Level 159–60, 161, 163, 165, 200, 225, 270 work-life balance 156 Wright Brothers 200 wrongful convictions 24–5 Xinyi (fictional name) 116–19 data mining see data mining see also Fixit (fictional company) Yeh, Robert 208–9 Zhuravskaya, Ekaterina 271–2 Founded in 1893, UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS publishes bold, progressive books and journals on topics in the arts, humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences—with a focus on social justice issues—that inspire thought and action among readers worldwide.

A Short Guide to a Long Life
by David B. Agus
Published 7 Jan 2014

If we believe we can be healthier, guess what: we will be. Some of the most dramatic experiments putting this idea to the test are those in which people unknowingly receive fake (placebo) treatments for real health problems and come out reporting that they have improved just as much as those who got the real treatment. The placebo effect is all about a positive belief system. On the other side of the equation are stories that reveal the power of a negative belief system, one of which was famously documented in 1974 when Sam Londe was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. At the time such a diagnosis was a death sentence, so no one was surprised when he died a few weeks later, despite treatment.

Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television
by Jerry Mander
Published 1 Jan 1977

Separate people's minds from their bodies, as in sense-deprivation experiments, thus clearing the mental channel for implanta- tion. Idealize the mind. Sensory experience cannot be eli- minated totally, so it should be driven into narrow areas. An emphasis on sex as opposed to sense may be useful because it is powerful enough to pass for the whole thing and it has a placebo effect. S) Occupy the mind. Once people are isolated in their minds, fill the brain with prearranged experience and thought. Content is less important than the fact of the mind being filled. Free-roaming thought is to be discouraged at all costs, because it is difficult to control. 6) Encourage drug use.

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The Simontons also use photos of cells, photos of cancers, X ray photos of the person's own cancer to aid the process of imaging and at some point they ask patients to visualize themselves totally well. Critics of the Simontons' success statistics like to argue that it is not the visualizations themselves which have produced the results, but rather the belief in them, the placebo effect. But, of course, this is an absurd criticism, because the belief in the cure is itself likely to come in the form of a visualization of the healthy body. In either event, it is the image that effects the cure. The Samuelses' book is an amazing and fascinating work. They quote from virtually every religious discipline, every healing system in the history of the world about which any evidence exists.

Split-Second Persuasion: The Ancient Art and New Science of Changing Minds
by Kevin Dutton
Published 3 Feb 2011

A couple of days later, they got one half to assess her for an extraverted job (estate agent), and the other half to assess her for an introverted job (librarian). What happened? You got it. Each group were better at remembering the attributes best suited to the job they were assessing. Exactly the same principle lies behind the placebo effect. 12In an amusing, ingenious (though sadly, unpublished) study which supposedly looked at the influence of subliminal messages on social interaction, a bunch of students had the word SEX daubed on their faces in sunscreen before going out and catching some rays. They were out just long enough for the effect of the sunscreen to become noticeable (to the researcher, that is, not the participants: volunteers were completely unaware of the content of the message) – in other words, for the word SEX to become very lightly emblazoned upon their skin.

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For more on the Wason selection task and hypothesis testing in general, see Garnham, Alan and Oakhill, Jane, Thinking and reasoning, Ch. 8 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). 11 Back in 1979, psychologists … Snyder, Mark and Cantor, Nancy, ‘Testing Hypotheses About Other People: The Use of Historical Knowledge.’ Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 15 (1979) 330–342. 12 In an amusing, ingenious … Henderson, Charles E., ‘Placebo Effects Prove the Value of Suggestion.’ http://www.biocentrix.com/hypnosis/placebo.htm (accessed May 28th, 2009). 13 In fact a recent study … Wiltermuth, Scott S. and Heath, Chip, ‘Synchrony and Cooperation.’ Psychological Science, 20 (2009): 1–5. 14 Social psychologist Miles Hewstone … Islam, Mir R. and Hewstone, Miles, ‘Intergroup Attributions and Affective Consequences in Majority and Minority Groups.’

Sickening: How Big Pharma Broke American Health Care and How We Can Repair It
by John Abramson
Published 15 Dec 2022

The purpose of an RCT is not to see whether people treated with the study drug (Neurontin, in this case) are better at the end of the study than at the beginning; that would be an uncontrolled study (like the Young study described above). The purpose of an RCT is to see if those treated with the study drug experience significantly more improvement than those in the group treated with placebo. For the Gorson study, comparison of the change in pain level between the two groups was important because the placebo effect came into play: A subjective end point, like pain, is far more susceptible to distortion than an objective end point, like blood-sugar levels or changes on an electrocardiogram. Also, people tend to volunteer for trials when their symptoms are at their worst, so with just the passage of time, pain is likely to return to its average symptom level without any treatment (called “regression to the mean”).

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Gorson had written in his original report: that Neurontin was “probably no more effective” than a sugar pill to treat pain. But in Pfizer’s account of the study, there was no mention that a placebo group had shown similar results, so doctors could be tricked into believing the pain reduction in the people treated with Neurontin was due to the drug when it might just as well have been the placebo effect combined with the tincture of time. At that point, the judge told Tom Sobol that it was time to finish up testimony for the day. I looked over at the jury and could see they understood how Pfizer had misrepresented the results of the Gorson study. More important, they now understood that scientific malfeasance was not out of bounds in the hardball world of pharmaceutical marketing.

Money Moments: Simple Steps to Financial Well-Being
by Jason Butler
Published 22 Nov 2017

American Association of Wine Economists, Working paper No. 16, April 2008 https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/aawe_wp16.pdf (accessed 27.10.17) 34Plassmann, H, J. O’Doherty, B. Shiv, A. Rangel, “Marketing actions can modulate neural representations of experienced pleasantness” https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18195362 (accessed 29.10.17) 35Plassmann, Hilke & Bernd Weber, “Individual Differences in Marketing Placebo Effects: Evidence from Brain Imaging and Behavioral Experiments”, Journal of Marketing Research, 2015 https://timedotcom.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/plassman_jmr_13_0613.pdf (accessed 29.10.17) 36Whillans, Ashley V., Elizabeth W. Dunn, Paul Smeets, Rene Bekkers, and Michael I. Norton. “Buying Time Promotes Happiness”, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 114, no. 32 (August 8, 2017).

A Devil's Chaplain: Selected Writings
by Richard Dawkins
Published 1 Jan 2004

If the pills cannot pass this test – if numerous strenuous efforts fail to distinguish them from a neutral placebo – I presume the company might be in danger of prosecution under the Trades Descriptions Act. Homeopathic remedies are big business, they are advertised as efficacious in various ways, yet they have never been demonstrated to have any effect at all. Personal testimony is ubiquitous, but it is useless evidence because of the notorious power of the placebo effect. This is exactly why ‘orthodox’ medicines are obliged to prove themselves in double-blind trials.8 I do not want to imply that all so-called ‘alternative medicines’ are as useless as homeopathy. For all I know, some of them may work. But they must be demonstrated to work, by double-blind placebo-control trials or some equivalent experimental design.

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The randomizing will be done by computer, in such a way that nobody will know which patients are experimentals and which controls. The patients themselves won’t know; the therapists won’t know; the pharmacists preparing the doses won’t know, and the doctors judging the results won’t know. The bottles of medicine will be identified only by impenetrable code numbers. This is vitally important because nobody denies placebo effects: patients who think they are getting an effective cure feel better than patients who think the opposite. Each patient will be examined by a team of doctors and homeopaths, both before and after the treatment. The team will write down their judgement for each patient: has this patient got better, stayed the same, or got worse?

Switched On: My Journey From Asperger's to Emotional Awakening
by John Elder Robison
Published 6 Apr 2016

Pharmaceutical researchers grapple with this issue all the time, as the success rate of placebos and real pills is often surprisingly similar. A few years ago researchers dismissed the placebo response as imaginary and of no medical value. Yet recent studies have shown the opposite: not only can the placebo effect deliver real lasting benefits, but the belief that something is making us sicker can actually lead to real deterioration, even death. Saying “It’s all in your mind” used to be a way to dismiss unexpected effects, but all of psychiatry is in the mind, so that dismissal is not so relevant when it comes to how we feel.

…

Might something similar have happened in the depression studies I read about? When treating a disorder of the mind, “believing it’s so” might well be tantamount to “making it so,” in a way that’s dramatically different from treating chronic disease elsewhere in the body. There was also another important difference when comparing the placebo effect in TMS and medications. In drug therapy, a placebo pill is truly inert. It’s flour, or sugar, something we know does not have curative properties. That’s not the case with sham TMS. Scientists create sham TMS in many ways, including by firing the TMS coil into space beside your head, firing it at a different area of your head, or firing it at a low power level.

10% Human: How Your Body's Microbes Hold the Key to Health and Happiness
by Alanna Collen
Published 4 May 2015

In a French clinical trial, fifty-five normal, healthy volunteers – humans this time – were given either a fruity-tasting bar containing two strains of live bacteria, or a matching bar but without the bacteria (a placebo). After a month of eating one bar daily, the volunteers given the live bacteria scored happier, less anxious and less angry than they had been before the trial – and the changes went beyond the placebo effect. As trials go, it’s short and small, but it offers a glimpse of research avenues worth exploring. How can eating live bacteria make you feel happier? Pleasingly, one potential mechanism seems to have to do with a chemical that’s well known to be involved in mood regulation: serotonin. This neurotransmitter is actually mainly found in the gut, where it keeps everything moving along nicely.

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I like to think of them helping the cells of my gut lining stay tightly knit together and calming my immune system. So far, so satisfying, but what about its impact on my health? It feels as if things are improving – my fatigue has eased off and my rashes have cleared up, for now at least. Time will tell whether that’s luck, the placebo effect, or a genuine result of eating more fibre, but it’s not something I’ll be giving up. The changes to my microbiota after dabbling in a high-fibre diet are not permanent, of course; to sustain the microbes they feed indefinitely, I have to keep the fibre content of my meals up where it belongs.

The Confidence Game: The Psychology of the Con and Why We Fall for It Every Time
by Maria Konnikova
Published 28 Jan 2016

There was no basis for animal magnetism, the commission reported back. The whole thing was a sham—at least from a scientific standpoint. From what standpoint was it not? If it was all a con, how had it had physical effects on so many people? Mesmerism is one of the earliest examples of the power of our beliefs to change reality: the placebo effect, or dissonance reduction at its finest, in full action. We want to believe something works, and so we will it to work. Our mind literally changes the reality of our body’s health. Mesmer clearly possessed strong powers of suggestion, and people really did get better in his presence. Scientifically, what he was doing was worthless.

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John ref1 moon ref1 Morrison, Bil ref1 Mother Teresa ref1 Motherwell, Robert ref1, ref2 motivated cognition ref1 motivation ref1, ref2 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus ref1, ref2 Nacro ref1 Nambu, Yoichiro ref1 name, remembering ref1 narcissism ref1, ref2 Nash, Jay Robert ref1 Nayfeh, Ali ref1 negative recency effect ref1 Neter, Efrat ref1 New Republic, ref1 Newsweek, ref1 New Yorker, ref1, ref2 New York Herald, ref1 New York Sun, ref1 New York Times, ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 Nigerian prince ref1 Niigaki, Takashi ref1 Nisbett, Richard ref1 Nixon, Richard ref1 nonchalance ref1 Norfleet, James Franklin ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 nudges ref1 Nuland, Sherwin ref1 Nygaard, Bob ref1, ref2 obedience ref1 Observer, ref1 Oesterline, Franzl ref1 oil development scheme ref1 omega ref1 optimism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 O’Reilly, William ref1 Oriña, Minda ref1 Orwell, George ref1 Ossorio, Alfonso ref1, ref2 Ostrom, Elinor ref1 Overbeck, Jennifer ref1 oxytocin ref1, ref2 Pak, Karla ref1 Pane, Sal ref1 Park, Bernadette ref1 Patten, Bebe ref1, ref2 Patten, Carl Thomas ref1, ref2 Paulhus, Delroy ref1 Pehl, Julie ref1 Penn and Teller ref1, ref2 Perenyi, Ken ref1 Perloff, Linda ref1 person perception ref1 persuasion ref1 Peters, Justin ref1 Peters, Tom ref1 phantom fixation ref1 phishing ref1, ref2, ref3 pig in a poke ref1, ref2 Pinker, Steven ref1 placebo effect ref1 play ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Poe, Edgar Allan ref1 Polcari, Stephen ref1 Pollock, Jackson ref1, ref2, ref3 Ponzi, Charles ref1, ref2 Ponzi schemes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 of Madoff ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 of Miller ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Popper, Karl ref1 position effects ref1 power ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Poyais ref1, ref2 Pratkanis, Anthony ref1 predictions ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 prejudice ref1 pressure ref1, ref2, ref3 Preuss, Carl ref1 Prévert, Jacques ref1 primates ref1 prisoner’s dilemma ref1, ref2 proposition bets ref1 Proska, Harold ref1 psychics ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Madame Zingara ref1, ref2 Rachel Lee ref1 Sylvia Mitchell ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Psychology Today, ref1 Psychopath Inside, The (Fallon), ref1 psychopathy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Publishers Clearing House ref1 put-up ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 Qian, Pei-Shen ref1 Quesenberry, Keith ref1 Quest, Richard ref1 radium ref1 Raine, Adrian ref1 Raines, Ralph, Jr., ref1, ref2 Randi, James ref1 rationalization ref1, ref2 Raven, Bertram ref1, ref2 reason, rationality and logic ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13, ref14 reciprocity ref1, ref2 recovery room scams ref1 regret ref1 religion ref1, ref2, ref3 cults ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Renée ref1 reputation ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 requests ref1, ref2, ref3 Reynolds, James ref1, ref2, ref3 Robbins, Apollo ref1, ref2 Robison, Robert ref1 Rockefeller family ref1 Rodenstock, Hardy ref1 Roese, Neal ref1 Rolling Stone, ref1 rope ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Rosales, Glafira ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Rosenthal, Robert ref1 Rosenzweig, Saul ref1 Rothko, Christopher ref1 Rothko, Mark ref1, ref2 Russell, Bertrand ref1 Russo, J.

Deep Medicine: How Artificial Intelligence Can Make Healthcare Human Again
by Eric Topol
Published 1 Jan 2019

See patent foramen ovale Phillips, Russell, 29 physical exams heart disease and, 299–302 neurology and, 300–301 observation and, 298–299 stethoscopes in, 301–302 telemedicine and, 308 time for, 299–300 physical therapy, 2–4, 182 Pickering, George, 241 picture archiving and communication systems (PACS), 113 pigeons used in radiology, 125 Pitts, Walter, 71–72 placebo effect, prescription drugs and, 36 Pomara, Nunzio, 172 post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), biomarkers for, 174–175 potassium levels, 60–61, 62 (fig.), 63–65, 184 Prakash, Simon, 59–62, 65–66 predicting disease C. diff and, 195 DNNs and, 190, 191 (table) EHRs used for, 190 prescription drugs, 182 clinical responsiveness to, 35–36, 37 (fig.) placebo effect and, 36 presence, 294 narrative medicine and, 295–296 observation and, 297–298 privacy, 19, 273 (fig.), 309 China and, 205–206 DeepMind and, 101–103 differential, 104 Facebook and, 103, 179–180 facial recognition and, 101 genomic data and, 101 global AI healthcare initiatives and, 207 mental health and, 173–174, 179–180 virtual assistants and, 260–261 virtual medical coaches and, 272, 274–276 Woebot and, 179–180 private-public partnerships, drug discovery and, 220 Project Survival, 220 Prospective Urban Rural Epidemiology (PURE) paper, 235, 236 (fig.), 237 prostate-specific antigen screenings (PSA screenings), 31–32 PSA screening.

Yoga Nidra: The Art of Transformational Sleep
by Kamini Desai
Published 7 Mar 2017

This phenomenon is known to modern science as the “placebo effect.” The body’s ability to heal itself through firm conviction has somehow been seen as suspect. If a medication with all kinds of side effects is curing your illness, that is fine. Yet if you have healed your own body through belief, with no side effects, there must be something wrong with that. What is wrong with your ailments disappearing if they are truly gone? Does it matter if healing was achieved through something other than medication? I believe this distrust of the placebo effect comes from the notion that healing just can‘t be that simple.

The Birth of the Pill: How Four Crusaders Reinvented Sex and Launched a Revolution
by Jonathan Eig
Published 12 Oct 2014

He extracted fluid from the testicles of freshly killed dogs and guinea pigs and injected it into his own body. Almost instantly, he reported, he felt like a new man. The scientist reported that the injections invigorated him, sharpened his intellect, relieved his constipation, and even increased the strength of his urine flow. Scientists today believe Brown-Séquard was the beneficiary of a placebo effect, but his experiment nevertheless gained wide attention and inspired other researchers to explore the secretions of internal organs. By 1905, scientists were learning about the body’s endocrine glands, which include the pituitary gland, thyroid gland, pineal gland, parathyroid glands, thymus, pancreas, testicles, ovaries, and adrenal glands.

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Richard, 198 petting, 126 Peyton Place (Metalious), 222–23 Pfizer, 191 pharmaceuticals industry, 4, 26–28, 103, 128–29, 135–39, 216, 242–48, 252–57, 273–75, 300, 301–2 see also specific companies pharmacopoeias, 282 phobias, 174, 175 physical deformities, 263 Piercy, Marge, 222 pill, birth control: absorption of, 191–92 advertising for, 258, 260, 262, 274–75, 282, 283, 299 anecdotal evidence on, 260–61 brochure for, 278–79, 299–300, 302 calendar for, 238, 315–16 cancer risk of, 282, 287, 288, 289, 291 Catholic opposition to, 254, 259, 263, 266, 268, 269–71, 273, 278–79, 283, 284, 293, 296–98, 299, 303, 306–7, 309–11, 313 competition in, 192, 255–56, 275 contamination of, 252–53 as contraceptive, 281, 297–99 controversy of, 254–60, 266–68, 274–75, 280–81, 297–98 cost and pricing of, 296, 297, 300, 304–5, 313 DeFelice’s report on, 283–92, 297–99 development of, 1–11, 99–103, 118–20, 123, 128–32, 139, 154–55, 157, 162–63, 171, 181–82, 189, 190–95, 199–200, 214–18, 219, 237–38, 249, 255–62, 294, 299–301, 307–8, 309, 311–15, 321–23 directions for, 274, 277 dosage for, 206, 216, 232, 242–43, 252–53, 262, 274, 296, 300, 313 education on, 274, 277, 278–79, 299–300, 302, 303 effectiveness of, 3–4, 199–200, 262, 285–86, 291–92 Enovid as trademark name of, 242, 249–50, 252, 256–59, 260, 261, 262–63, 264, 269–70, 273–75, 277, 278, 282, 283, 284, 286, 287, 289, 290, 296, 297–99, 302, 304, 305, 311, 313, 317 FDA approval of, 242–43, 245, 253, 256–57, 258, 261–62, 274–75, 277, 281–92, 297–303, 308, 311 FDA first decision on, 297–303, 308 FDA questionnaire on, 289–92, 297 FDA second decision on, 303, 308, 311 first day of sale for (October 1, 1957), 262–63 formula for, 201 as infertility drug, 256–57, 258, 259, 265 in-house newsletter on, 302 introduction of, 199–200, 201, 204, 213–18, 219, 249–59, 273–75 label for, 192, 277, 299 legal issues for, 276, 294–95 long-term effects of, 157, 181–82, 205, 252–57, 260–61, 274–75, 281–92, 320–21 male reaction to, 264–65 manufacture of, 4, 128–29, 135–39, 216, 242–48, 252–57, 273–75, 300, 301–2 marketing of, 242–48, 261–62, 269–70, 273–79, 292, 300, 302–4, 318 McCormick’s support for, 258, 260, 280, 293, 308 media coverage of, 163, 164, 192, 195–99, 208–9, 259–60, 264, 265, 266–68, 295, 299, 306–7, 312, 313, 314 for men, 179–80, 296 menstruation and, 253, 256–59, 271, 278, 281, 286–87, 292, 315 mestranol in, 252–53, 301 official announcement of, 199–200, 201, 204, 213–18, 219, 258–59 ovulation controlled by, 262, 265, 269–71, 278, 287, 299, 312 package for, 315–16 patents for, 128–29, 163, 300–301, 315–16 Pincus’s development of, 1–11, 23, 199–200, 201, 213–18, 219, 237–38, 249, 255–62, 294, 299–301, 307–8, 309, 311–15, 321–23 plastic paperweight given with, 302–3 popularity of, 313, 316, 319–23 premature menopause from, 286–87, 289, 292 prescription for, 4, 257, 258–59, 260–61, 264, 270, 277–78, 280, 285–86, 289, 297, 301–3, 305, 316, 320–21 profits from, 255–56, 303 progesterone in, 135–39, 144–46, 278, 301 publicity for, 192, 199–200, 201, 205, 218, 231, 248, 263–64, 280–81, 302–4 public opinion on, 256, 263–64, 302–4 Rock’s promotion of, 249, 259, 277–79, 287–90, 299, 306–7, 308 sales for, 199–200, 201, 321 Sanger’s support for, 3–4, 30, 258, 260, 293, 294, 295–96, 308 scientific evaluation of, 215–18, 283–92, 297–99 Searle as manufacturer of, 249, 254–59, 264, 283, 285–92, 293, 297–304, 311, 315–16 side effects of, 61, 128, 181, 191–92, 201–2, 205, 217, 218, 237–38, 240, 242–43, 248, 249, 251–53, 260–62, 265, 273–75, 281–92, 296, 298, 300, 313, 320–21 social impact of, 254–55, 264–68, 276–77, 278, 279–80, 281, 284, 295, 309–23 statistical data collected on, 242–43, 253, 281–82, 283, 288, 298, 320–21 stockholder return on, 303 success rate for, 262, 285–86, 291–92 synthetic hormones in, 135–39, 144–46, 191, 201, 205, 217, 232, 256 tablet form of, 10, 249 “The Pill” as name for, 303–4, 313 women’s support for, 192–93, 253–54, 303–7, 310, 312–13 pillboxes, 315–16 Pincus, Alexander Gregorovich, 63 Pincus, Alex John, 69–70, 79, 81, 87 Pincus, Bernard, 69 Pincus, Elizabeth Notkin (Lizzie), 68–70, 79–88, 89, 202–3, 204, 206–7, 214, 272, 273, 307–8, 314 Pincus, Gregory Goodwin (Goody): ambition of, 2, 4, 10, 62, 72–77, 101–2, 206–7, 299–301 animal testing methodology of, 2, 3, 20–23, 26–28, 98–99, 153–56, 225 background of, 62–68 as birth control pill advocate, 1–11, 23, 99–103, 118–20, 123, 128–32, 139, 154–55, 157, 162–63, 171, 181–82, 189, 190–95, 199–200, 201, 213–18, 219, 237–38, 249, 255–62, 294, 299–301, 307–8, 309, 311–15, 321–23 birth control pill developed by, 1–11, 23, 199–200, 201, 213–18, 219, 237–38, 249, 255–62, 294, 299–301, 307–8, 309, 311–15, 321–23 birth of, 64–65 in Boston, 87–88, 190–91, 199–200 at Cambridge University, 71, 77 chess played by, 85 at Clark University, 2–3, 15, 78–81, 131 as controversial figure, 2, 73–82, 83, 102–3, 162–63, 215–16 at Cornell University, 66–68 correspondence of, 27–28, 66, 67–68, 119, 158, 192, 206, 219, 237–40, 241, 260, 299–300, 312, 315, 331n death of, 315 diary of, 65 at Dorado Beach Hotel, 307–8 driving by, 6–7, 84–85, 190, 200, 261 employees of, 27–28, 82–83, 88–89, 110, 153, 179, 273–74 eugenics as viewed by, 71, 73–74 as father, 69–70, 79, 81, 83–88 fertility studies of, 99–100, 128–29, 225, 226 finances and funding of, 2, 8, 11, 22–23, 26–28, 58–61, 72, 77–79, 80, 81, 82, 84, 85–86, 88, 118–20, 128–30, 140–45, 153–54, 162–63, 206–7, 232, 235, 255–56, 300–301, 305–6, 314 at Harvard University, 2, 9, 69–78, 79, 93, 102, 103–4, 111, 131, 154, 206–7, 259, 309 health of, 311–15 human trials conducted by, 128–29, 140, 152, 156–61, 171–80, 192–93, 200, 201–2, 204, 205, 213, 217, 229–32, 234, 248, 249–52, 260–61, 273–74, 281–82, 283, 296–97, 304, 309, 321 in vitro fertilization by, 2, 72–73, 80, 110, 111–12, 154, 162, 163 Jewish ancestry of, 2, 62–63, 71, 72, 77, 78, 79, 103–4, 313 at Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, 71 leadership of, 131–32, 162–63, 164, 205–6, 216–17, 260–61 marriage of, 3, 68–70, 79–88, 189, 202–3, 206–7, 214, 307–8, 314 mentally ill women tested by, 174–80 Northborough, Mass. residence of, 85–86 official announcement of pill made by, 199–200, 201, 204, 213–18, 219, 258–59 ovulation experiments of, 8, 10, 21–23, 72–73, 74, 80, 99–100, 128–29, 154, 191, 225, 226 patents issues as viewed by, 128–29, 163, 300–301 personality of, 6–7, 8, 10, 22–23, 27–28, 62–63, 66–68, 82–89, 110, 189, 202–3, 204, 206–7, 216–17, 236–37, 261, 299–300, 307–8 physical appearance of, 1–2, 8–9, 65–66, 311–12 Planned Parenthood support for, 58–61, 99, 123–24, 128–30, 140, 143–44, 155–56, 163, 185–86, 193–95, 199, 300, 305–6, 312 population control as viewed by, 100, 155, 248, 312–13 press coverage of, 2, 8, 73–77, 80, 162–63, 259–60, 264, 265, 314 progesterone research of, 9–11, 20–28, 58–61, 73, 103, 110, 116, 117–20, 122, 123, 128–39, 143–46, 154, 156, 163, 165, 171–73, 175, 180, 190–95, 201, 204, 217–18, 225, 278, 301 progestins used by, 138, 144–45, 154–56, 190–95, 201, 296, 301 progress reports of, 128–29, 192–94, 315 public relations efforts of, 162–63, 164 rabbit experiments of, 2, 8, 9–11, 21–23, 58, 72–77, 80, 98–99, 116, 123, 128, 130, 134, 153, 157 rat experiments of, 22–23, 71, 98–99, 116, 128, 130, 134, 144, 153 reputation of, 1–2, 88–89, 99–102, 110, 214–20, 259–60, 309, 311–12, 315 Rice-Wray’s cooperation with, 168–71, 172 Rock’s relationship with, 103–4, 116, 117–18, 132–34, 140, 141, 156–57, 161, 181–82, 205, 207, 216, 218, 287, 312 salary of, 145, 301 Salk compared with, 162–63 Sanger’s first meeting with, 1–11, 103, 293, 331n Sanger’s support for, 1–11, 20, 23, 25, 26–28, 62, 98–101, 103, 140–42, 155, 171, 172, 179–80, 189, 192, 199–204, 235, 236, 260, 293, 309, 312, 331n in San Juan, 158, 169–70, 190 scientific career of, 67, 68, 69–82, 99–100, 119–20, 153–54, 205–6, 219–20, 235, 259–60, 300–301, 311–15, 322–23 Scrabble played by, 85 Searle’s support for, 232, 242–43, 245, 246, 248, 255–61, 264, 300–301, 313, 314 Searle stock owned by, 232, 255–56, 258, 300–301, 313, 314) as sexologist, 68–69, 77–78, 206 in Sweden, 259 in Tokyo, 199, 205–7, 214–18, 219, 232, 311, 318 in Tucson, Ariz., 202–4 in Vineland, N.J., 68 in Woodbine, N.J., 64–65 at Worcester State Hospital, 93 writings of, 75–76, 314 Pincus, Joseph, 63–64 Pincus, Laura, 79, 82, 84, 87–88, 194, 217, 272–73, 299–300, 322–23 Pincus, Lizzie Lipman, 64, 66, 67–68 Pincus Progesterone Project (PPP), 132–34, 143–44 pinups, 18 Pittsburgh Press, 195 pituitary gland, 122, 205, 216 Pius XI, Pope, 107–8, 224, 225 Pius XII, Pope, 225, 270, 271, 284 placebo effect, 122, 250 placenta, 10 Planned Parenthood Federation of America, 11, 22, 27, 58–61, 95, 98, 99, 123–24, 128–30, 140, 143–44, 164, 147–48, 155–56, 163, 169, 170–71, 185–86, 193–97, 199, 203–4, 212, 224–25, 231, 236, 268, 284, 291, 300, 305–6, 310, 312 Playboy, 17–18, 188–89, 265 Playboy Club, 294 “Plight of the Young Mother, The,” 197 pneumonia, 45–46, 96 pogroms, 62–63 polio vaccine, 162, 300 pomology, 67 Popular Library, 125 population control, 20, 24–25, 42–43, 58–61, 100, 123–25, 150–51, 160, 163–64, 167, 168, 193–97, 200, 223–24, 248, 285, 288, 304–6 Population Council, 103, 236 pornography, 17–18, 43–44, 56, 188–89, 279–80 Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 251–52 Portet, Lorenzo, 42 Post Office, U.S., 41, 44 Pratt, Caroline, 45 preeclampsia, 292 pregnancy, 1, 6, 10, 19–20, 29–30, 33, 34–39, 49–50, 55–56, 58, 73–75, 77, 105, 108–9, 115–17, 118, 126, 147–48, 165–66, 172–73, 177–78, 183–84, 205, 225–26, 240–41, 269–71, 278, 319–20 pregnanediol, 234 pregnenolone, 80–81 premarital sex, 186–87 prescriptions, 4, 49, 50–51, 257, 258–59, 260–61, 264, 270, 277–78, 280, 285–86, 289, 297, 301–3, 305, 316, 320–21 President Cleveland, 210 Presley, Elvis, 124–25, 188, 223 primates, 12–13 Private Life of Helen of Troy, The, 125 Procter & Gamble, 160 Productos Esteroides, 256 progesterone, 9–11, 20–28, 58–61, 73, 103, 110, 115–20, 122, 123, 128–39, 143–46, 154, 156, 163, 165, 171–73, 175, 180, 181–84, 190–95, 201, 204, 205, 217–18, 225, 232–33, 234, 278, 301 progestins, 138, 144–45, 154–56, 190–95, 201, 205, 232–33, 296, 301 promiscuity, 14, 54–55 prostitution, 14, 49, 53, 211, 313 Protestantism, 6, 50, 242, 297, 307 “pseudo pregnancies,” 115, 288 psychoanalysis, 187 psychosomatic symptoms, 249–50 psychotics, 179, 180 puberty, 10, 122 Puerto Rican Association of Population Studies, 170 Puerto Rico, 124, 158–73, 180, 189, 190, 192–95, 198, 201–2, 205, 213, 217, 227, 229–32, 238–43, 248, 249–54, 256, 260–61, 272–74, 292, 300, 304, 307–8 Puerto Rico, University of, 158, 172, 201–2 Puritanism, 6 Queens County Penitentiary, 47 Quines, Fanny, 241–42 rabbit experiments, 2, 8, 9–11, 21–23, 58, 72–77, 80, 98–99, 116, 123, 128, 130, 134, 153, 157 “racial hygiene,” 148 Rainbow, Jackie, 188 Rainwater, Lee, 150 rape, 65, 295 rat experiments, 22–23, 71, 98–99, 116, 128, 130, 134, 144, 153 Raymond, Albert L., 27, 144–45, 247–48, 331n Reader’s Digest, 111, 126, 306 Rebel Without a Cause, 222 reflexes, 70 Reich, Wilhelm, 16, 18 Reiland, Karl, 50 Remarque, Erich Maria, 125 reproductive rights, 3, 52, 55, 95–96, 105–6, 163–65, 183–84 Reston, James, 195–96 “rhythm method,” 38, 108–9, 112, 225–28, 271, 310 Rhythm of Sterility and Fertility in Women, The (Latz), 108–9 Rice-Wray, Edris (Edie), 168–71, 172, 195–96, 238–43, 248, 249–50, 251, 282, 312 Richardson-Merrell Inc., 293–94 Rio Piedras neighborhood, 229–32, 238–43, 253–54, 272–73, 274 Road to Survival, The (Vogt), 58, 123–24 Roberts, Mary Louise, 124 Rock, Anna Thorndike, 106 Rock, Jack, 182 Rock, John: abortion as viewed by, 105 background of, 104–5 biography of, 227 as birth control advocate, 104, 109–13, 144, 181–89, 204, 227–28, 232–34, 242–43, 249, 259, 277–79, 287–90, 299, 306–7, 308, 309, 321–22 birth control pill promoted by, 249, 259, 277–79, 287–90, 299, 306–7, 308 as Catholic, 104, 105, 106, 110–11, 112, 113, 144, 181, 182, 184, 205, 227–28, 230, 232–34, 259, 269, 270, 277, 299, 306–7, 309–10, 311 correspondence of, 205 DeFelice’s meeting with, 287–90 estrogen treatments of, 115–17, 118, 132 finances and funding for, 181, 195, 277–79, 311 as gynecologist, 103–7, 111–13, 116, 182, 184, 287–90 at Harvard, 105, 181, 195 health of, 182–83 human trials conducted by, 156–58, 159, 171–72, 173, 195, 205, 206, 217, 229, 234, 260–61, 281–82, 283, 304 infertility research of, 111–18, 128, 130, 132–34, 140, 141, 145, 156–57, 161, 181–89, 193–94, 225, 226, 232 marriage as viewed by, 110–11 marriage of, 106, 277 personality of, 104–5, 110, 189, 234 physical appearance of, 105 Pincus’s relationship with, 103–4, 116, 117–18, 132–34, 140, 141, 156–57, 161, 181–82, 205, 207, 216, 218, 287, 312 as Planned Parenthood member, 182, 184–86, 188 population control supported by, 184 press coverage of, 111, 306–7 progesterone treatments of, 115–18, 128, 132–34, 181–84, 205, 232–33, 234 progestin tested by, 205, 232–33 Puerto Rican trials as viewed by, 159, 161, 189, 229, 230 “rebound effect” discovered by, 117, 134, 181, 257 reputation of, 110–11, 116, 181–89, 232–34, 287–90 Sanger’s views on, 109–10, 144, 181–82, 269 Searle’s support for, 260–61, 277–79, 311 sexuality as viewed by, 104–6, 110–11, 184–85 speeches of, 184–86, 188 women’s rights as viewed by, 105–6, 110–11 writings of, 111, 306–7, 309–10 Rockefeller, John D., Jr., 60–61, 284 Rockefeller Foundation, 24, 61, 136–38 Rockefeller Institute, 136–38 “Rock Rebound,” 117, 134, 181, 257 Rodriguez, Iris, 231–32, 240 Rome, 14 Roosevelt, Eleanor, 55 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 55 roosters, 121 Root Chemicals Inc., 256 Rosenkranz, George, 138 Rosset, Barney, 279 Rotary Club, 22 Roth, Philip, 279 Royal Scientific Society, 121 Royal Swedish Endocrine Society, 231 RU-486 pill, 314 rubber, 7, 47 Rublee, Juliet Barrett, 145–46, 203 Russell, Bertrand, 42, 54 Russia, 63 Ryan, John A., 109 Ryder Memorial Hospital, 250–51 Sabsovich, Hirsch Loeb, 63 Sachs, Sadie, 35 sacraments, 226–27 “safe periods,” 108, 225–26 St.

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams
by Matthew Walker
Published 2 Oct 2017

For these reasons, melatonin is not a powerful sleeping aid in and of itself, at least not for healthy, non-jet-lagged individuals (we’ll explore jet lag—and how melatonin can be helpful—in a moment). There may be little, if any, quality melatonin in the pill. That said, there is a significant sleep placebo effect of melatonin, which should not be underestimated: the placebo effect is, after all, the most reliable effect in all of pharmacology. Equally important to realize is the fact that over-the-counter melatonin is not commonly regulated by governing bodies around the world, such as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Scientific evaluations of over-the-counter brands have found melatonin concentrations that range from 83 percent less than that claimed on the label, to 478 percent more than that stated.VI Once sleep is under way, melatonin slowly decreases in concentration across the night and into the morning hours.

Why Things Bite Back: Technology and the Revenge of Unintended Consequences
by Edward Tenner
Published 1 Sep 1997

Critics of McKeown have pointed out the limits of such statistical arguments, which ignore how medical knowledge and medical initiatives worked in the public arena—how physicians supported better urban sanitation, for example, and how special hospitals for tuberculosis patients by the late nineteenth century slowed the spread of the disease. The statistics also neglect a physician's ability to comfort and to relieve pain, and the undisputed power of the placebo effect. Furthermore, they slight the more recent gains that clearly are due to antibiotics and other medication, and to diagnostic technology. Even so, the role of medical therapeutics in long-term health remains uncertain. If medicine has done less in combating infectious disease than is usually assumed, what has been responsible for declining mortality?

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Thomas keeps in his office one design probably born of someone's frustration: it is not really a club, but more like a portable pendulum, and of course is barred by The Rules of Golf (The long putter, held against the sternum and despised by many golfers, is still legal.) What makes a putter or any other new design work, Thomas and other golf researchers believe, is not the intended mechanical effect at all but a placebo effect. The golfer's unconscious mind knows how to swing. It is the conscious mind, with its anxieties, that throws the player off. What new technology does is to liberate the real golfer by disarming consciousness and letting underlying knowledge of the game take over. Invention does the work of meditation, and players credit manufacturers rather than themselves—for a while.

The Invention of Science: A New History of the Scientific Revolution
by David Wootton
Published 7 Dec 2015

We only need to turn to the doctors of Montaigne’s day for a cautionary example. They thought they were using their knowledge to cure patients. In fact, their preferred remedies (bleedings and purges) did no good at all.27 They mistook the patients’ spontaneous recovery (thanks to the workings of their immune systems), combined with the placebo effect, for cures brought about by medical therapy (and intelligent bystanders such as Montaigne suspected as much).v In medicine there were no reliable methods of measuring success until the nineteenth century. But the Ptolemaic astronomers of Montaigne’s day were very different from the Hippocratic doctors.

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Taylor) 550 Ortelius, Abraham 125 Osborne, Dorothy 456n Osiander, Andreas 388 Othello (William Shakespeare) 201 Ottoman empire 105 Outline of Pyrrhonism (Sextus Empiricus) 558 Oviedo 132 ovism 238 Oxford, Earl of 9n Oxford English Dictionary (OED) Charleton quoted many times 398 ‘evidence’ 400, 402 ‘experiment’ 312 ‘fact’ 252, 254 ‘knowledge’ 420 ‘observation’ 313 ‘propeller’ 552n ‘scientific’ 22n search facilities 592 ‘theory’ 395n Oxford University 31n, 34, 41n, 143–4, 146, 536 oxygen 86–7, 88, 91, 97 Pacioli, Luca 173, 175–6, 205 Padua astrarium 436 centre of anatomical studies 86 Copernicus in 142 Galileo living and lecturing in 8, 118 Harvey in 516 library 273 Regiomontanus lectures at 187 Paesi novamenti retrovati (pub. Vicenza) 76 Paine, Thomas 20 Palais Royal, Paris 436 Paley, William 419, 446 Panofsky, Erwin 201 Pantagruel (François Rabelais) 239 Papin, Denis 491–508, 645–8nn39–79 countries worked in 516 Newcomen and 499–508 North’s notebook and 494 placebo effect 569n Royal Society pays 32 Savery and 496–8 Paracelsus 198n, 294, 409 paradigms 585 parallax 190–5, 197, 303 parapsychology 463 Pardies, Ignatius 383–4 Paris 311 Parisian school 114, 120, 138, 140, 337 Parker, Bishop Samuel 40–1, 433 Parmenides 66, 91 Parsons, Robert 404–5, 409, 411 Pascal, Blaise announces to Mersenne 348 barometers and Torricellian tubes 335, 336, 352 Borges on 239 Boyle and 350–2 change of direction 310n eternal science of infinite spaces 448 evidence used by 415 experience, the authority of 417–18 ‘fact’, the word 291, 294, 295 first real experiment and 311–12, 315 Guiffart defends 77n imagining the earth from space 230 Jansenism, in defence of 290 liquid pressure study 317–18n micro-organisms 239 on the universe 243 practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge 395n Puy-de-Dôme see Puy-de-Dôme science and religion 358 theory and observation 394 Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids 338 types of knowledge 341 undermining respect for antiquity 346 vacuums 105, 297–8, 324, 439 weighing the air 52 works by 293 Pascal, Étienne 97, 101 Pascal’s barrel 318n Pascal’s Snail 97, 97 Passi, Pietro 278 patents 106 Pathologia hæreditaria generalis (Edmund O’Meara) 74 Patriarch of Antioch, the 353–4 Patrick, Simon 486 Patrizi, Francesco 25n Paul III, Pope 223n Paul of Burgos 113 Pecquet, Jean 338, 339–40 peer review 96 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 306, 341 Peking 180, 182 Pemberton, John 473 pendulum clocks 305, 445, 446, 481 see also clocks penicillin 16 Pensées (Blaise Pascal) 310n Pereira, Duarte Pacheco 125n Périer, Florin 310, 340, 348, 352 perspective painting 164–80 Brunelleschi 58n, 165–72 Father Niceron 173, 174 Masaccio 172, 177–8 mathematics and 175–6, 200 mirrors 169–71 Pacioli 173, 175–6 surveying and 190 tiled floors 201 Vitruvius 251 Peter Martyr 121 Peter of Abano 72 Petit, Pierre 335, 349, 352 Petrarch 119, 146, 186n Petri, Franciscus 106 Petty, William 260, 412 Peuerbach, Georg 187, 228, 229, 246 Phalaris, letters of 466 ‘Phases of Venus before 1610’ (Roger Ariew) 228n phenomena 266 Philolaus the Pythagorean 78 Philosophia pia (Joseph Glanvill) 460 Philosophical Investigations (Ludwig Wittgenstein) 42 Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society) alchemy generally excluded from 357 book review in 347n ‘evidence’, use of word 417 first journal devoted to new science 341 intellectual property concept 337 Papin and 501, 502, 506 ‘theory’, first use of word by 383, 396 Philosophical Writings (René Descartes) 388n philosophy (use of term) 7–11, 25, 27–8, 36–7, 425, 536 see also corpuscular philosophy; mechanical philosophy Physica (Jacques Rohault) 473 physical world, the 457 Physico-Mechanical Lectures (John Theophilus Desaguliers) 475 Physico-Theology (William Derham) 473 Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletonia (Walter Charleton) 296 Physiological Essays (Robert Boyle) 26, 280, 294 physiology 27 Piccolomini, Alessandro 71, 130, 230n, 414 Pickering, Andrew 517n, 589 Pierre, Georges 353–4 ‘Pierre Duhem and the History of Late-medieval Science’ (John Murdoch) 16n Pillars of Hercules ii, 79, 103, 119 pineal gland 377 Pinelli, Giovanni Vincenzo 273 Pinta (ship) 57, 89 Pisa 80, 335 placebo effect 569n plagiarism 101–2, 337 planets 223 Plato an innovator 66 book frontispiece 204 Charleton envisages 402 doubling the area of a square 100 knowledge and reminiscence 75 movement in the heavens 144 nominalism and 322 on experience 52 recovery of texts 50n Renaissance and 203 signatures, theory of 409 types of knowledge 321 Pliny see also Natural History distances 611n10 flood accounts 113 Madeira 62 magnets that repel iron 278 medieval view of 7 omissions in work of 67 reputation in decline 26 unreliability of 12 water levels 137 wine adulterated with water 272 Ziegler’s commentary 128 Plus ultra (Joseph Glanvill) 37–8, 358, 453 Plutarch Galileo and 216, 217 Madeira 62 on experience 268–9, 277–8, 282 Pluto 99 Pole Star 120, 188, 190n, 320 politeness 470–1 Politics (Aristotle) 61 Polybius 412 Pope, Alexander 361 Popper, Karl Open Society and Its Enemies, The 357n quoted 249, 556 refutation of belief systems 45n science and common sense 529, 543 science and free societies 360 showing limitation of argument from fact 289 three worlds of 96n Popular Errors (Laurent Joubert) 304 Porter, Roy 588–9 Portuguese (people) African coast 98 carracks 104 effect of voyages 61n equator 72, 73, 120 Maçao 205 Pillars of Hercules 103 spice trade 524 take lead in voyages of discovery 58 Portuguese language 29, 57, 408 Portuguese Voyages to America (Samuel Eliot Morison) 125n positivism 586 Postan, M.

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Vicenza) 76 Paine, Thomas 20 Palais Royal, Paris 436 Paley, William 419, 446 Panofsky, Erwin 201 Pantagruel (François Rabelais) 239 Papin, Denis 491–508, 645–8nn39–79 countries worked in 516 Newcomen and 499–508 North’s notebook and 494 placebo effect 569n Royal Society pays 32 Savery and 496–8 Paracelsus 198n, 294, 409 paradigms 585 parallax 190–5, 197, 303 parapsychology 463 Pardies, Ignatius 383–4 Paris 311 Parisian school 114, 120, 138, 140, 337 Parker, Bishop Samuel 40–1, 433 Parmenides 66, 91 Parsons, Robert 404–5, 409, 411 Pascal, Blaise announces to Mersenne 348 barometers and Torricellian tubes 335, 336, 352 Borges on 239 Boyle and 350–2 change of direction 310n eternal science of infinite spaces 448 evidence used by 415 experience, the authority of 417–18 ‘fact’, the word 291, 294, 295 first real experiment and 311–12, 315 Guiffart defends 77n imagining the earth from space 230 Jansenism, in defence of 290 liquid pressure study 317–18n micro-organisms 239 on the universe 243 practical knowledge and theoretical knowledge 395n Puy-de-Dôme see Puy-de-Dôme science and religion 358 theory and observation 394 Treatise on the Equilibrium of Liquids 338 types of knowledge 341 undermining respect for antiquity 346 vacuums 105, 297–8, 324, 439 weighing the air 52 works by 293 Pascal, Étienne 97, 101 Pascal’s barrel 318n Pascal’s Snail 97, 97 Passi, Pietro 278 patents 106 Pathologia hæreditaria generalis (Edmund O’Meara) 74 Patriarch of Antioch, the 353–4 Patrick, Simon 486 Patrizi, Francesco 25n Paul III, Pope 223n Paul of Burgos 113 Pecquet, Jean 338, 339–40 peer review 96 Peiresc, Nicolas-Claude Fabri de 306, 341 Peking 180, 182 Pemberton, John 473 pendulum clocks 305, 445, 446, 481 see also clocks penicillin 16 Pensées (Blaise Pascal) 310n Pereira, Duarte Pacheco 125n Périer, Florin 310, 340, 348, 352 perspective painting 164–80 Brunelleschi 58n, 165–72 Father Niceron 173, 174 Masaccio 172, 177–8 mathematics and 175–6, 200 mirrors 169–71 Pacioli 173, 175–6 surveying and 190 tiled floors 201 Vitruvius 251 Peter Martyr 121 Peter of Abano 72 Petit, Pierre 335, 349, 352 Petrarch 119, 146, 186n Petri, Franciscus 106 Petty, William 260, 412 Peuerbach, Georg 187, 228, 229, 246 Phalaris, letters of 466 ‘Phases of Venus before 1610’ (Roger Ariew) 228n phenomena 266 Philolaus the Pythagorean 78 Philosophia pia (Joseph Glanvill) 460 Philosophical Investigations (Ludwig Wittgenstein) 42 Philosophical Transactions (Royal Society) alchemy generally excluded from 357 book review in 347n ‘evidence’, use of word 417 first journal devoted to new science 341 intellectual property concept 337 Papin and 501, 502, 506 ‘theory’, first use of word by 383, 396 Philosophical Writings (René Descartes) 388n philosophy (use of term) 7–11, 25, 27–8, 36–7, 425, 536 see also corpuscular philosophy; mechanical philosophy Physica (Jacques Rohault) 473 physical world, the 457 Physico-Mechanical Lectures (John Theophilus Desaguliers) 475 Physico-Theology (William Derham) 473 Physiologia Epicuro-Gassendo-Charletonia (Walter Charleton) 296 Physiological Essays (Robert Boyle) 26, 280, 294 physiology 27 Piccolomini, Alessandro 71, 130, 230n, 414 Pickering, Andrew 517n, 589 Pierre, Georges 353–4 ‘Pierre Duhem and the History of Late-medieval Science’ (John Murdoch) 16n Pillars of Hercules ii, 79, 103, 119 pineal gland 377 Pinelli, Giovanni Vincenzo 273 Pinta (ship) 57, 89 Pisa 80, 335 placebo effect 569n plagiarism 101–2, 337 planets 223 Plato an innovator 66 book frontispiece 204 Charleton envisages 402 doubling the area of a square 100 knowledge and reminiscence 75 movement in the heavens 144 nominalism and 322 on experience 52 recovery of texts 50n Renaissance and 203 signatures, theory of 409 types of knowledge 321 Pliny see also Natural History distances 611n10 flood accounts 113 Madeira 62 magnets that repel iron 278 medieval view of 7 omissions in work of 67 reputation in decline 26 unreliability of 12 water levels 137 wine adulterated with water 272 Ziegler’s commentary 128 Plus ultra (Joseph Glanvill) 37–8, 358, 453 Plutarch Galileo and 216, 217 Madeira 62 on experience 268–9, 277–8, 282 Pluto 99 Pole Star 120, 188, 190n, 320 politeness 470–1 Politics (Aristotle) 61 Polybius 412 Pope, Alexander 361 Popper, Karl Open Society and Its Enemies, The 357n quoted 249, 556 refutation of belief systems 45n science and common sense 529, 543 science and free societies 360 showing limitation of argument from fact 289 three worlds of 96n Popular Errors (Laurent Joubert) 304 Porter, Roy 588–9 Portuguese (people) African coast 98 carracks 104 effect of voyages 61n equator 72, 73, 120 Maçao 205 Pillars of Hercules 103 spice trade 524 take lead in voyages of discovery 58 Portuguese language 29, 57, 408 Portuguese Voyages to America (Samuel Eliot Morison) 125n positivism 586 Postan, M.

The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use
by Bobbi Bly
Published 18 Mar 2009

Gary took black and white photos with a non-digital camera in HOMAGE to Ansel Adams, whose works he greatly admired. homeopathy (HOME-ee-oh-path-ee), noun The medical practice of giving patients minerals, metals, herbs, and other bioactive compounds in extremely diluted form. Most modern scientists believe the effectiveness of HOMEOPATHY in some cases is due mainly to the placebo effect. homeostatis (ho-me-oh-STAY-sis), noun A dynamic system in which balance between input and output has been achieved, so no net changes take place. When HOMEOSTATIS is achieved in a sealed biosphere, the animals and plants can live without outside air, food, or water. homogenous (ho-mo-JEAN-yus), adjective Consistent in composition or uniform in structure.

Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives
by Satyajit Das
Published 15 Nov 2006

DAS_A01.QXD 5/3/07 8:01 PM Page viii Contents List of figures and tables xii Preface xiii Prologue 1 Miracles and mirages Serial crimes Beginning of the end/end of the beginning Knowns and unknowns Unreliable recollections Summary judgment 2 5 9 12 13 17 1 Financial WMDs – derivatives demagoguery 19 School days It’s all Chinese to me A derivative idea Betting shops Secret subtexts Leveraged speculations Under the radar Whole lotta swapping going on The golden age/LIBOR minus 50 Warehouses Serial killings Forbidden fruit Derived logic 2 Beautiful lies – the ‘sell’ side Smile and dial Market colour Rough trade Analyze this 21 22 23 25 27 29 32 33 37 40 43 45 50 53 55 56 59 62 DAS_A01.QXD 5/3/07 ix 8:01 PM Page ix Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y Class wars Ultra vires Feudal kingdoms Uncivil wars Golden rules Business models The medium is the message Bondage Tabloid cultures Conspicuous currency Ethnic cleansing Foreign affairs FILTH Lost in translation A day in the life 3 True lies – the ‘buy’ side Turn of the fork Risky business Magic kingdoms Stripping or stacking/hedging perils, again Me too ‘Zaiteku’ or the bride stripped bare The gamble in P & G Tobashi, baby Gnomes of Zermatt and Belgian dentists Death swaps Investment fashions Alpha, beta, zeta Looking after the relatives Agents all Unique selling propositions 4 Show me the money – greed lost and regained Money uncertainty Toll booths Take a seat Efficient markets On the platform A day at the races Black swans, black sheep Trading places 64 66 67 68 70 71 74 75 76 77 79 80 81 82 83 87 88 89 91 95 97 98 101 105 107 108 110 112 115 116 117 121 122 123 125 126 127 129 130 131 DAS_A01.QXD 5/3/07 8:01 PM Page x Contents Secret intelligence Overwhelming force Oracle of Delphi Free money The colour of money In reserve A comedy of errors Black holes What’s the number? Nothing like excess Nice work if you can get it Dukes of Hazard 5 The perfect storm – risk mismanagement by the numbers Shock therapy Holy risk! Risk spin Risqué matters Placebo effects Among the unbelievers Risk cults In the long run . . . Modus operandi Secret trader’s business Let the good times roll The perfect storm Weather forecasts Endgame Mean risk Extreme sports 6 Super models – derivative algorithms Out of the sheltered workshops Rocket science Culture wars Conveyor belts Trivial pursuits Grand oprey The quest Genesis Gospels x 133 134 135 137 138 140 141 143 146 148 149 151 153 154 155 156 158 160 162 164 167 169 170 171 172 173 175 176 177 181 182 184 185 187 188 189 190 193 196 DAS_A01.QXD 5/3/07 8:01 PM Page xi Tr a d e r s , G u n s & M o n e y xi Greek tragedies Failing the model test CSI (Crime Scene Investigation) 1987 – ‘Oh LOR-dy!’

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Fischer Black, one of the creators of the Black–Scholes–Merton model, did not like false degrees of precision, too many decimal points were misleading when the information was inexact. Risk managers and modellers largely ignore this. Spreadsheets with floating 16 decimal points provide false comfort in the perfect storm. Risk is itself a risky business. Placebo effects Risk management abounds in myths, for example the 4:15 Report. The title refers to the time in New York at which the chairman of JP Morgan received a daily report summarizing the bank’s risk. The idea was that the entire bank’s risk was reduced to this simple number; the popular mythology was that you pressed a button and out popped the report, but the reality was probably less glamorous.

The Panic Virus: The True Story Behind the Vaccine-Autism Controversy
by Seth Mnookin
Published 3 Jan 2012

“By contrast, the views expressed in the paper are unambiguously clear: ‘we did not prove an association between measles, mumps, and rubella vaccine and the syndrome described.’ ” 26 There are several ways to conduct randomized trials. The ideal one is through a double blind test, in which neither the researcher nor the test subjects know who is being studied and who is a control. Double blind trials protect against the placebo effect on the part of the subject and observer bias (or wishful thinking) on the part of the researcher. 27 A real-world example of a theory proven to be true after all three types of studies were performed is the beneficial effects of fluoridation. First was the case series: A dentist noticed that patients with mottled teeth seemed to have less tooth decay.

…

An indiscriminate attitude toward treatment also makes it hard to determine what changes are due to the natural rhythms of disease: Temporary ailments by definition get better and the symptoms of lifelong conditions almost always wax and wane, which means that even the most far-fetched cure is bound to look like a winner every now and again. In his book Innumeracy, the mathematician John Allen Paulos describes how proponents of pseudoscientific therapies rely on this reality to shade their products in the best light possible. “To take advantage of the natural ups and downs of any disease (as well as of any placebo effect),” Paulos writes, “it’s best to begin your worthless treatment when the patient is getting worse. In this way, anything that happens can more easily be attributed to your wonderful and probably expensive intervention. If the patient improves, you take credit; if he remains stable, your treatment stopped his downward course.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads
by Tim Wu
Published 14 May 2016

“Do as millions have done—stop doubting—give Liquozone a test.”13 The average consumer who did so would go on to spend 91 cents on the medicine before realizing its uselessness.14 By the early 1900s, Hopkins could also sense the beginnings of a mounting reaction and hostility toward patent medicines, which, after all, typically didn’t do what they claimed, apart from some narcotic or placebo effects. Business continued booming but skepticism was rising among the suckers. Such was Hopkins’s genius, however, that his work now began riding the growing backlash like a riptide: his product would be advertised as the anti–snake oil. Liquozone was the real thing. In the words of his direct mail literature: We wish to state at the start that we are not patent medicine men, and their methods will not be employed by us….Liquozone is too important a product for quackery.15 By 1904, Hopkins and Smith saw revenues of $100 million (in current dollars), having sent out five million free samples.

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After peaking in 1907, this once mighty American industry began a death spiral, finally to become a fringe business by the 1930s. We can also see patent medicine as a victim of its own success. In some version, folk medicines had been around for centuries, and when their claims were more modest, and their advertising less importunate, they may have delivered some of what they promised at least by virtue of the placebo effect, which, as scientists have shown, can be quite significant. But the industry had caught the spirit of late nineteenth-century capitalism, and for patent medicine, this translated into too great a fraud, too much profit, too much damage to public health. And so the industry collapsed of its own weight.

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up: The Japanese Art of Decluttering and Organizing
by Marie Kondo
Published 1 Jan 2011

I don’t remember exactly when I started doing it, but I believe I was inspired to do so because the tense expectancy in the air when a client opens the door resembles the atmosphere when one passes under a shrine gate and enters the sacred precincts. You may think that this ritual could only have a placebo effect, but I have noticed a real difference in the speed with which tidying occurs when I perform it. Incidentally, I don’t wear sweats or work clothes when I tidy. Instead, I usually wear a dress and blazer. Although occasionally I don an apron, my priority is on design over practicality. Some clients are surprised and worry that I might ruin my clothes, but I have no trouble moving furniture, climbing onto kitchen counters, and doing the other active work involved in tidying while dressed up.

How to Weep in Public: Feeble Offerings From One Depressive to Another
by Jacqueline Novak
Published 1 Mar 2016

Not to mention, if you ever bring up in public the fact that you are on meds, you run the risk of having to listen to some asshole who doesn’t believe in them, who thinks they dull the personality or are a refusal to truly deal with your problems. Or some BS like that. I fully believe in meds myself (it helps boost the placebo effect), despite their unreliability and unknown long-term effects. My view is this: when it comes down to it, your entire physical being is no more than a stew of chemicals and hormones anyway, so why not tinker with the ingredients? I’ve always thought of my body as a lab experiment, and it’s worked well for me.

How to Read Numbers: A Guide to Statistics in the News (And Knowing When to Trust Them)
by Tom Chivers and David Chivers
Published 18 Mar 2021

Lower-back pain is a nasty thing to have, and clearly put some hard limits on Gary’s life. But on the scale of things, if a lot of people read his story and end up using a patch in the hope that it will reduce their backache, that isn’t such a terrible outcome. And perhaps it will do some good – if the treatment works, or if it gives people hope, or reduces pain via the placebo effect – although at a cost, to the health service or patients who pay for it. Sometimes, it’s easy to laugh at. For instance, another story in the Mail in 20198 claimed that six people recovered from psoriasis after taking homeopathic remedies based on snake venom, whale vomit, decomposed beef and ‘the urethral discharge of a man who had gonorrhoea’.

In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters With Addiction
by Gabor Mate and Peter A. Levine
Published 5 Jan 2010

Scientists have observed, for example, that when people expect relief from pain, the activity of opioid receptors will increase. Even the administration of inert medications—substances that do not have direct physical activity—will light up opioid receptors, leading to decreased pain perception.7 This is the so-called “placebo effect,” which, far from being imaginary, is a genuine physiological event. The medication may be inert, but the brain is soothed by its own painkillers, the endorphins. Opiate receptors can be found throughout the body and in each organ they play a specific role. In the nervous system they are tranquilizers and painkillers, but in, say, the gut, their role is to slow down muscle contractions.

…

Moles, “Deficit in Attachment Behavior in Mice Lacking the Mu-opioid Receptor Gene,” Science, 25 June 2004, 1983–86. 5. Panksepp et al., “The Role of Brain Emotional Systems,” 459–69. 6. J.-K. Zubieta, “Regulation of Human Affective Responses by Anterior Cingulate and Limbic µ-Opioid Neurotransmission,” Archives of General Psychiatry 60(2003): 1145–53. 7. J.K. Zubieta et al., “Placebo Effects Mediated by Endogenous Opioid Activity on Mu-opioid Receptors,” Journal of Neuroscience 25(34) (24 August 2005): 7754–62. 8. J. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 250. 9. Ibid, 256. 10. A.N. Schore, Affect Regulation and the Origin of the Self (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1994), 142–43. 11.

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don't Have To
by David A. Sinclair and Matthew D. Laplante
Published 9 Sep 2019

Since that conversation, which took place in the fall of 2017, I have known a couple of other women and read the accounts of others claiming to have had similar experiences. These cases could, perhaps, be the result of a placebo effect. But a trial in 2018 to test whether an NAD booster could restore the fertility of old horses was successful, surprising the skeptical supervising veterinarian. As far as I know, horses don’t experience the placebo effect. Still, these stories and clinical results could be random chance. These matters will be studied in much greater detail. If, however, it turns out that mares and women can become fertile again, it will completely overturn our understanding of reproductive biology.

And Finally
by Henry Marsh

Vanity, of course. Many of the listed side effects – such as headaches, dizziness and chronic fatigue, constipation, diarrhoea – are very non-specific. The problem with these non-specific symptoms is that we are all deeply suggestible. It is called the nocebo effect. This is the opposite of the benign placebo effect, where people will feel better because they have been told to expect to, and not because of a direct effect of the particular treatment they have been given. With the nocebo effect you feel worse, because you expect to. Looking at my brain scan had had the same effect – it took a while before I could overcome the feeling that I was already dementing.

Food Allergy: Adverse Reactions to Foods and Food Additives
by Dean D. Metcalfe
Published 15 Dec 2008

Seven infants had complete resolution of their rash, 12 had some skin improvement while on the diet, and the remaining infant had no change in skin condition. While the cumulative results of the above studies provide support for the role of food allergy in AD, most of the trials failed to control confounding factors such as other potential AD triggers, placebo effect, or observer bias. In one of the original prospective follow-up studies of the natural history of food hypersensitivity in children with AD, Sampson and Scanlon [41] studied 34 subjects with AD, of whom 17 had food allergy diagnosed by doubleblind, placebo-controlled food challenges (DBPCFCs).

…

This is largely because reports of tartrazine-induced effects on mental function and behavior are plagued by poorly designed studies, imprecise definitions of hyperactivity, and poor reliability of behavioral outcome measures. Furthermore, it has been difficult to define study populations and segregate them from the background noise of a larger heterogeneous population of children. Placebo effects, as detected by vigilant parents, have consistently reflected parental attitudes and bias in favor of tartrazine as a perceived cause of their child’s problems. A number of articles, where poorly performed studies of tartrazine and hyperkinesis were reported, were not selected for mention in this review.

…

Headache frequency and severity were both reduced compared to baseline by both fish oil and olive oil (p
0.0001 and p
0.01–0.03, respectively). Reductions were in the range of 65–87% for severity, duration, and frequency for both treatments. The authors suggested both modalities were having an active effect, and the magnitude of the improvement argued against placebo effect. Association of food allergy and migraine Allergy to food is self-reported more commonly in migraineurs than those with non-migrainous headache or without headache [13]. Pinnas and Vanselow have pointed out that the association between allergy and migraine is more than a 100 years old [14]. In 1885, Trousseau had included periodic headache in the allergic diathesis; Tileston in 1918 likened migraine to asthma; and the following year, Pagniez considered migraine as a manifestation of anaphylaxis [14].

My Journey as a Combat Medic: From Desert Storm to Operation Enduring Freedom
by Patrick Thibeault
Published 23 Jul 2012

There was an airstrip right outside the town that could easily handle a C-130 cargo plane landing. This was important in case we had to call in a medical evacuation request. We stayed in an enclosed area that belonged to the Afghan government, sleeping in the same large room with the Afghan Army soldiers. Some of those soldiers knew that I was a medical person, so I had to practice the placebo effect. They would walk up to me, pat their stomach like it was hurting, and then touch their forehead like they were in pain, letting out a large sigh. I had seen this act several times now on different missions that I went on with the Afghan Army. I interpreted this gesture as the universal sign meaning, “there is really nothing wrong with me, but I saw you giving the other soldiers some pills, so I want some pills too.”

You're Not Doing It Right: Tales of Marriage, Sex, Death, and Other Humiliations
by Michael Ian Black
Published 28 Feb 2012

(Another way to get genital anesthesia is to rub cocaine all over your dick. Or so I’ve heard.) Anyway, doctors know SSRIs do all of those things, but they have no idea if they actually treat some of the problems for which they are prescribed. But they work great for me. Question: how do I know it is actually the drug working and not simply the placebo effect? Answer: I don’t. Nor do I care. Whether the drug actually does something or my brain is just gullible does not matter to me at all. Interestingly, another study just came out in the journal PLoS ONE (bad name for a medical journal) showing that placebos are still effective even when the patient knows he is taking a placebo.

The Complete Low-FODMAP Diet: A Revolutionary Plan for Managing IBS and Other Digestive Disorders
by Sue Shepherd and P. R. Gibson
Published 12 Aug 2013

Four out of five found the diet easy to stick to for a long period of time (months and years), and three out of four found that all of their IBS symptoms (pain, bloating, and change in bowel habits) improved markedly. This improvement was greater than we had seen for any drug or other treatment approach. This was only a preliminary experiment, however. It was still necessary to prove that the results were not due to the “placebo effect.” To do this, we rechallenged the patients whose symptoms improved on the low-FODMAP diet, this time with a double-blind, quadruple-arm, randomized, cross-over, placebo-controlled rechallenge trial in twenty-five people. This means that we tested twenty-five people by putting them on or off the diet, without them or us knowing whether or not they were taking in FODMAPs.

Think Twice: Harnessing the Power of Counterintuition
by Michael J. Mauboussin
Published 6 Nov 2012

When he asked me what I thought, I told him, “I try to think like a scientist. And based on everything I can see, this won’t work.” Hanging up the phone, I felt torn. I wanted to believe the story and go with the inside view. I wanted my father to be well again. But the scientist in me admonished me to stick with the outside view. Even considering the power of the placebo effect, hope is not a strategy. My father died shortly after that episode, but the experience compelled me to think about how we decide about our medical treatments. For a long time, the paternalistic model reigned in relationships between physicians and patients. Physicians would diagnose a condition and select the treatment that seemed best for the patient.

The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma
by Bessel van Der Kolk M. D.
Published 7 Sep 2015

The study was blinded: Neither we nor the patients knew which substance they were taking, so that our preconceptions could not skew our assessments. Everyone in the study—even those who had received the placebo—improved, at least to some degree. Most treatment studies of PTSD find a significant placebo effect. People who screw up their courage to participate in a study for which they aren’t paid, in which they’re repeatedly poked with needles, and in which they have only a fifty-fifty chance of getting an active drug are intrinsically motivated to solve their problem. Maybe their reward is only the attention paid to them, the opportunity to respond to questions about how they feel and think.

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E., 232 Lazar, Sara, 209–10, 275 learning disabilities, neurofeedback and, 325 LeDoux, Joseph, 60, 206 legal cases: admissibility of evidence in, 174–75 involving pedophile priests, 183, 190, 191 Lejune, Camp, 270 Letters to a Young Poet (Rilke), 87 Let There Be Light (film), 187, 220 Levine, Peter, 26, 96, 217–18, 245, 408n Lifton, Robert J., 19 limbic system, 42, 42, 56–57, 59, 60, 64 development of, 56–57 therapy for, 205–6 in trauma survivors, 59, 95, 176, 265 see also emotional brain lithium, 27–28, 136, 225 loss, as basic human experience, 26–27 love, as basic human experience, 26–27 LSD, 223 L-tryptophan, 34 lupus erythematosus, 126 Lyons-Ruth, Karlen, 119–22 MacArthur, Douglas, 186 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 43, 230 McFarlane, Alexander, 89, 245–46, 311–12, 324–25 McGaugh, James, 176 MacLean, Paul, 64 McNeill, William H., 333 Maier, Steven, 29–30 Main, Mary, 115–17, 381n Mamet, David, 331 managers, in IFS therapy, 282, 286–88, 291–92, 293 Mandela, Nelson, 356 map of the world, internal: in childhood trauma survivors, 127–30 of children, 109, 127, 129 March of the Penguins (film), 96 Marlantes, Karl, 233–34 martial arts, 86, 208, 355 Massachusetts Department of Mental Health, 253 Massachusetts General Hospital, 192, 251 Neuroimaging Laboratory of, 40 Massachusetts Mental Health Center, 19–20, 22, 26, 28, 36, 142, 259–60 see also Children’s Clinic (MMHC); Trauma Clinic massage therapy, 89, 92 Matthew, Elizabeth, 253–54 Maurice, Prince of Orange, 333–34 MDMA (ecstasy), 223–24 meaning-making, as human trait, 16–17 medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), 62, 63, 69, 91, 92, 96, 274, 274 accessing emotional brain through, 206, 206, 236, 353 balance between amygdala and, 62–64 sensory self-awareness and, 90–91, 206, 354, 376n, 408n, 417n Medicaid, 37 medicine, non-Western, 76, 86, 207–8 meditation, 208 mindfulness, 63, 321, 400n in yoga, 270 Meltzoff, Andrew, 112 memory: level of arousal and, 175–76 as narrative, 176, 179, 194, 219 rewriting of, 175, 191, 236, 255–56, 398n see also repressed memory; traumatic memory mental health, safety as fundamental to, 351, 352 mental hospitals, population of, 28 mental illness: disorder model of, 27 genetics and, 151–52 pharmacological revolution and, 36–38 as self-protective adaptations, 278–79 social engagement and, 78–79 methylation, 152 militarism, 186 mindfulness, 62, 63, 96, 131, 207, 208–10, 224, 225, 269, 270, 283, 292, 321 meditation for, 63, 321, 400n Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR), 209 Minnesota Longitudinal Study of Risk and Adaptation, 160–61 Minsky, Marvin, 281 mirror neurons, 58–59, 78, 102, 111–12 misdiagnosis, of childhood trauma survivors, 136–48, 150, 151, 157, 226 model mugging program, 218–19, 308 monomethylhydrazine (MMH), 315 mood dysregulation disorder, 226 mood stabilizing drugs, 225 Moore, Dana, 269 MPFC, see medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) multiple personality disorder, 277–78 Murray, Henry, 105–6 Murrow, Ed, 43 muscular bonding, 333–34 music, in trauma recovery, 242–43, 349, 355 Myers, Charles Samuel, 185, 187, 189 Myers, Frederic, 189 naltrexone, 327 Nathan Cummings Foundation, 155 National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), 315 National Association of State Mental Health Program Directors, 159 National Child Traumatic Stress Network (NCTSN), 155–56, 157, 351, 356 National Institutes of Health, 28, 138, 207, 251, 254, 315, 329 DSM-5 diagnostic criteria rejected by, 165–66, 329 nature vs. nurture debate, 153–55, 160 Nazis, shell-shock victims as viewed by, 186–87 neocortex, see rational brain nervous system, 76–77 autonomic (ANS), 60, 63–64, 77, 80, 225, 266–67 parasympathetic (PNS), 77, 83–84, 264, 266–67 sympathetic (SNS), 77, 82, 82, 209, 266–67 neuroception, 80 neurofeedback, 207, 312–29, 313, 418n ADHD and, 322 alpha-theta training in, 321, 326 author’s experience of, 313–14 dissociation and, 318 epilepsy and, 315 history of, 315 learning disabilities and, 325 performance enhancement and, 322 PTSD and, 326–28 self-regulation in, 313 substance abuse and, 327–28 Trauma Center program for, 318–20 neuroimaging, see brain scans neuroplasticity, 3, 56, 167 neuroscience, 2, 29, 39, 275, 347 neurotransmitters, 28–29 see also specific neurotransmitters Newberger, Carolyn and Eli, 355 New England Journal of Medicine, 374n–75n New York Times, 334, 375n nightmares, 8, 9, 14, 15, 20, 44, 134–35, 327 Nijenhuis, Ellert, 281 1984 (Orwell), 109 non-Western medicine, 76, 86, 207–8 norepinephrine, 29 North American Association for the Study of Obesity, 144 numbing, 14–15, 67, 71–73, 84, 87–89, 92, 99, 119, 124, 162–63, 198, 205, 247, 265–66, 273, 279, 304–5, 306 see also freeze response (immobilization) obesity, 144, 147, 162, 266 Ogden, Pat, 26, 96, 217–18 Olds, David, 167 On the Origin of Species (Darwin), 74 oppositional defiant disorder (ODD), 150, 151, 157, 282, 392n orbital prefrontal cortex, 91 Oresteia (Aeschylus), 332 Orr, Scott, 33 Orwell, George, 109 out-of-body experiences, 100, 132–33, 286, 386n oxytocin, 223 Packer, Tina, 330, 335, 345–46 “Pain in Men Wounded in Battle” (Beecher), 32–33 painkillers, 146, 349 panic attacks, 97, 172 Panksepp, Jaak, 334, 387n, 398n paralysis, episodic, 228–29 paranoid schizophrenia, 15 parasympathetic nervous system (PNS), 77, 83–84, 264, 266–67 parent-child interactive therapy (PCIT), 215 parietal lobes, 91 Pascual-Leone, Alvaro, 417n Pasteur, Louis, 164 Patton, George, 186 Pavlov, Ivan, 39 Paxil, 35, 225, 254 PBSP psychomotor therapy, see psychomotor therapy Pearlman, Chester, 409n pendulation, 217–18, 245, 286, 333, 408n Peniston, Eugene, 326, 327 Pennebaker, James, 239–41, 243 performance enhancement, neurofeedback and, 322 periaqueductal gray, 102 Perry, Bruce, 56 Perry, Chris, 138, 141, 296 Pesso, Albert, 297–99 pharmaceutical industry, power of, 374n–75n pharmacological revolution, 27–29, 36–38, 310 profit motive in, 38 phobias, 256 physical actions, completion of, in trauma survivors, 96 physical activity: calming effect of, 88 in trauma therapy, 207–8 physiology: self-regulation of, 38 see also body; brain Piaget, Jean, 105 Pilates, 199 Pitman, Roger, 30, 33, 222 placebo effect, 35 plane crashes, survivors of, 80 Plutarch, 334 pneumogastric nerve, see vagus nerve Pollak, Seth, 114 polyvagal theory, 77–78, 86 Porges, Stephen, 77–78, 80, 83, 84–85, 86 positron emission tomography (PET), 39 Possibility Project, 335, 340–42 posterior cingulate, 90–91, 91 Posttraumatic Cognitions Inventory, 233 pranayama, 86, 270 prefrontal cortex, 59, 68–69, 102 executive function in, 62 see also medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) prefrontal lobes, 254 Prince, Morton, 184 Principles of Psychology, The (James), 277 prisons: population of, 348 spending on, 168 prolactin, 223 propranolol, 225 proprioceptive (balance) system, 247 protagonists, in psychomotor therapy, 297, 300–302 proto-self, 94 Prozac (fluoxetine), 34–35, 37, 223, 262 PTSD and, 35–36, 225, 226, 254, 261 psychiatry: drug-based approach of, 315, 349 socioeconomic factors ignored in, 348 psychoanalysis, 22, 184, 230–31 see also talk therapy (talking cure) psychodynamic psychotherapy, 199 Psychology Today, 315 psychomotor therapy, 296–308 author’s experience in, 298–99 feeling safe in, 300, 301 protagonists in, 297, 300–302 structures in, 298–308 witnesses in, 297, 300, 301, 306 psychopharmacology, 20, 206 psychotherapy, of child neglect survivors, 296–97 psychotropic drugs, 27–29, 37–38, 101, 136, 315, 349–50 PTSD and, 254, 261, 405n in trauma recovery, 223–27 see also specific drugs PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder): acupuncture and acupressure in treatment of, 410n–11n amygdala-MPFC imbalance in, 62–64 attention and concentration problems in, 311–12 brain scans of, 102, 347, 408n brain-wave patterns in, 311, 312 CBT and, 194, 220–21 children of parents with, 118–19 diagnosis of, 136–37, 142, 150, 156–57, 188, 319 dissociation in, 66–68 EMDR in treatment of, 248–49, 253–54 exposure therapy and, 256 flashbacks in, 72, 327 in Holocaust survivors, 118–19 HRV in, 267, 268 hypersensitivity to threat in, 102, 327, 408n language failure in, 244–45 MDMA in treatment of, 223–24 memory and, 175, 190 numbing in, 72–73, 99 psychotropic drugs and, 254, 261, 405n reliving in, 66–68, 180–81, 325 and security of attachment to caregiver, 119 sensory self-awareness in, 89–92 social engagement and, 102 substance abuse and, 327 yoga therapy for, 207, 228–29, 268–69 PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), of accident and disaster survivors, 41–43, 142–43, 348 EMDR and, 260 flashbacks in, 66–67, 68, 68, 196–98 hypersensivity to threat in, 45–47, 68 irritability and rage in, 68, 248–49 Lelog as, 177–78 numbing in, 198 PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), of combat veterans, 1–2, 106, 348, 371n antipsychotic drugs and, 226–27 attention and concentration problems of, 312 CBT and, 194, 220–21 diagnosis of, 19–21 downside of medications for, 36–37 flashbacks in, 8, 13, 16, 227 hypersensitivity to threat in, 11, 327 hypnosis and, 187, 220 in-or-out construct in, 18 irritability and rage in, 10, 14 neurofeedback and, 326–28 nightmares in, 8, 9, 14, 15, 134–35 numbing in, 14–15 pain and, 33 prevalence of, 20 Prozac and, 35–36, 226 serotonin levels in, 33–34, 36 shame in, 13 shell-shock as, 11, 184–85 sleep disorders in, 409n stress hormone levels in, 30 suicide and, 17, 332 theater as therapy for, 331–32, 343–44 traumatic event as sole source of meaning in, 18 VA and, 19, 187–88, 222–23 yoga therapy for, 270 PTSD scores, 254, 319, 324 Puk, Gerald, 252–53 purpose, sense of, 14, 92, 233 Putnam, Frank, 30, 161–64, 251 qigong, 86, 208, 245, 264 quantitative EEG (qEEG), 323 rage, 83 displacement of, 133–34, 140 in PTSD, 10, 14, 68, 248–49 in trauma survivors, 46, 95, 99, 285, 304 “railway spine,” 177 rape, 1–2, 17, 88, 213–14 increased incidence of, in survivors of childhood abuse, 85, 146–47 prevalence of, 20–21 rational brain, 55, 57–58 balance between emotional brain and, 64–65, 129–30, 205, 310 feelings and, 205 Rauch, Scott, 40, 42 reactive attachment disorder, 150, 151 reciprocity, 79–80 reckless behavior, 120 reenacting, 31–33, 179, 180, 181, 182 relationships: emotional brain and, 122 mental health and, 38, 55 in trauma recovery, 210–13 see also intimacy; social engagement reliving, 66–68, 180–81 Relman, Arnold, 374n–75n Remarque, Erich Maria, 171, 186 Rembrandt van Rijn, 215 Remembering, Repeating and Working Through (Freud), 219 REM sleep, 260–61, 309–10, 409n repressed memory, 183, 184–99 of childhood sexual abuse survivors, 190, 397n false memories and, 189, 190, 191–92 reliability of, 191 see also traumatic memory Research Domain Criteria (RDoC), 165–66 resilience, 105, 109, 161, 278–79, 314, 316, 351, 355, 356 Respiridol, 215 rhesus monkeys: peer-raised, 154 personality types in, 153 rheumatoid arthritis (RA), IFS in treatment of, 291–92 rhythmic movement, in trauma therapy, 85, 207, 208, 214, 242–43, 333–34, 349 right temporal lobe, 319, 324 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 87 Risperdal, 37, 226, 227 Ritalin, 107, 136 ritual, trauma recovery and, 331–32 Rivers, W.

Daily Rituals: How Artists Work
by Mason Currey
Published 22 Apr 2013

“What I’ve found with daily routines,” he said recently, “is that the useful thing is to have one that feels new. It can almost be arbitrary. You know, you could say to yourself, ‘From now on, I’m only going to write on the back porch in flip flops starting at four o’clock in the afternoon.’ And if that feels novel and fresh, it will have a placebo effect and it will help you work. Maybe that’s not completely true. But there’s something to just the excitement of coming up with a slightly different routine. I find I have to do it for each book, have something different.” While he was writing his first book, The Mezzanine, Baker worked a series of office jobs in Boston and New York.

McMindfulness: How Mindfulness Became the New Capitalist Spirituality
by Ronald Purser
Published 8 Jul 2019

Beard supplemented these treatments by administering electrotherapy, thinking human nerves could be recharged like a battery. Applying a mild electric current to patients, he placed one electrode on the scalp and then moved his hand with the other over parts of the body. Many said they felt refreshed after electrotherapy, even in cases where the battery had died without their knowing. Similar to a placebo effect, Beard called this “mental therapeutics.” Eventually, neurasthenia faded into the annals of history, only to be replaced with something almost as nebulous: stress. The Caveman Theory Most modern explanations of stress — and therefore mindfulness — invoke the idea that we are maladapted cavemen inhabiting twenty-first-century lifestyles.

Cooking for Geeks
by Jeff Potter
Published 2 Aug 2010

(You could heat up the 30-minute batch, but then we’d be changing more than one variable: who’s to say that reheating doesn’t change something?) Once both samples are cold, do a taste comparison. Got kids? Do a single-blind experiment to remove the placebo effect: blindfold the kids and don’t let them know which is which. Got a spouse and kids? Do a double-blind experiment to control for both placebo effect and observer bias: have your significant other scoop the beef into the containers and label them only "A" and "B," not telling you which is which, and then go ahead and administer the blindfold test to your kids. 158°F / 70°C: Vegetable Starches Break Down Whereas meat is predominately proteins and fats, plants are composed primarily of carbohydrates such as cellulose, starch, and pectin.

The Big Fat Surprise: Why Butter, Meat and Cheese Belong in a Healthy Diet
by Nina Teicholz
Published 12 May 2014

The hope is to avoid the preferential treatment that an experimenter might feel inclined to give to the intervention group (a form of bias called the “performance effect”) or, equally, the participant’s often-unconscious positive response to knowing that he or she is receiving an intervention (known as the “placebo effect”). The latter is the reason why drug studies usually hand out placebos to the control group: so that everyone has the same experience of taking a pill. Realistically, though, a diet that includes butter, cream, and meat does not look or taste like a diet without them, so a truly blind diet experiment is difficult.

…

Akikuyu, 144–45 meats as animal, 16–18 Nabisco: hydrogenated oils and, 237, 254n trans-free alternatives and, 270–71 tropical oils and, 229, 230, 235 National Academy of Sciences, 4, 166 children and, 147–48, 150 political issues and, 123–27, 147 trans fats and, 267 National Association of Margarine Manufacturers, 247, 254n, 261, 267 National Cancer Institute (NCI), 111, 166–68, 192, 263 National Cholesterol Education Program (NCEP), 133, 136, 146, 159, 162, 164–65, 321n, 323 National Diet Heart Study, 70, 91–92, 95 National Health and Nutrition Examination Surveys (NHANES), 115n, 249n, 250–51 National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI), 120, 321n AHA and, 68–70, 133–34 cancer-cholesterol connection and, 94–95 children and, 146–47, 152 Consensus Conference and, 131–33 dietary recommendations of, 131–32, 159, 307n, 329 heart disease and, 68–70, 80, 159–60 low-fat diet and, 159, 329 research and, 70, 80–82, 127–31, 160, 169–70, 307n, 322, 329 women and, 159–60, 169–70 National Heart Advisory Council, 70 National Heart Institute (NHI), 32, 68–70 National Heart Saver Association, 230 National Institutes of Health (NIH), 32, 60, 127, 137, 145, 255, 275, 276n, 308n, 315n, 321n children and, 147, 153, 155–56, 158 cholesterol and, 69n, 94, 162–64, 248, 268n, 317–18, 322–23 Consensus Conference of, 131–34, 132, 147, 155 dietary recommendations of, 4, 153, 320 diet-heart hypothesis and, 68, 70, 92 heart disease and, 162, 268n, 323 Keys and, 47, 68 Mann and, 66–68 NHLBI and, 68–70 research and, 66–68, 70, 77, 82n, 91–92, 95, 106, 153, 156, 163, 195, 241, 281, 303, 309, 315n, 316 saturated fats and, 227, 320, 322 Native Americans, 14–15, 29 Ness, Andy R., 208 Nestle, Marion, 185, 188, 192–93, 196, 197n Netherlands, 34, 37, 41, 223, 252 New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), 67n, 201–2, 253, 264, 296–97 Newer Knowledge of Nutrition, The (McCollum), 148–49 Newsweek, 141, 193, 196, 264, 289 New York Times, 13, 74, 109, 112, 138, 150, 170, 235, 329 diet-heart hypothesis and, 52–53 Keys and, 33, 51 Mediterranean diet and, 197–98, 215 Ornish and, 143, 145n political issues and, 125–26 Taubes and, 312–14, 312 New York Tribune, 114–15 Nicolosi, Robert J., 255, 265 NiHonSan, 98–100 Nixon, Richard, 248 non-HDL-cholesterol, 319n, 323 Norway, 27n, 34, 34, 36–37 Not by Bread Alone (Stefansson), 9–10 Nurses’ Health Study, 109, 144n, 167, 219n Food Frequency Questionnaire (FFQ) in, 262–63 trans fats and, 259–60, 262–63, 265–66 Nutrition Foundation, 105–6, 126 nuts, 112, 157, 210, 287 clinical trials and, 212, 213n, 214–15 Mediterranean diet and, 174, 180, 187, 198–99, 207–8, 212, 213n, 214–15 USDA and, 186 obesity, 3, 10, 28, 29n, 49n, 59, 110, 113, 136, 266, 321, 326–32, 336 Atkins and, 289, 291, 306–8 carbohydrates and, 58, 301, 311, 313–14, 326, 335 clinical trials and, 92, 213, 215, 306, 329 hormones in, 294–97, 311, 314 low-carbohydrate diet and, 292–93, 296, 298, 331 low-cholesterol diet and, 4–5 low-fat diet and, 4–5, 171–72, 289, 328, 332 Mediterranean diet and, 175, 206 nutrition science and, 13–14 political issues and, 112, 121 Taubes and, 311–13, 312 in US, 328 women and, 326n, 329 obesity sextette, 298, 301, 336 Odyssey (Homer), 204 Oldways Preservation and Exchange Trust, 183, 184n, 193–97 IOOC and, 193–94, 197n Mediterranean diet and, 190–91, 193, 195–97, 218 Olestra, 228 olive oil, olives, 26, 84, 193–205, 222–26, 233, 274, 331 extra-virgin, 201, 203, 215 health effects of, 6, 179, 199–203, 224 heart disease and, 38, 202–3, 333 in history, 86, 200, 204–5, 224 Mediterranean diet and, 1, 173–76, 179, 181–82, 185–86, 187, 188, 194, 196–200, 202, 205, 207, 209–12, 213n, 214–15, 220, 222–24 monounsaturated fats and, 8, 16n, 25, 86, 187, 199n, 203, 210, 282 Oldways and, 193–96 promotion of, 194–97, 204–5, 226 research and, 38, 179, 194–95, 200–205, 209–12, 213n, 214–15, 256 trans fats and, 252–53, 256 in US, 199, 231 Oliver, Michael, 61, 70n–71n, 100–101 Olson, Robert E., 126 omega-3 fatty acids, 8, 205, 210, 275–76 omega-6 fatty acids, 8, 275–76 OmniHeart, 321 O’Neill, Molly, 198 Ong, Tan Sri Augustine, 234–36 Oreo cookies, 271–72 Ornish, Dean, 184–85, 189, 197, 309n Atkins and, 289–90, 305 heart disease reversal and, 140–43 near-vegetarian diet and, 140, 143, 145–46, 289 Osler, Sir William, 118, 293 Oslo study, 78–79, 91n, 95, 324 overweight, 49, 55, 172, 266, 294, 306, 310, 326n, 330 see also obesity Ozonoff, David, 250 Paleo diet, 6, 139n palm oil: campaigns against, 228–30, 232–33, 235–37 defense of, 234–37 of Malaysia, 232–34, 236–37, 277 saturated fats and, 8, 26, 230, 320 as trans-free option, 270, 272, 275 Pariza, Michael, 264 pasta, 4, 28, 101, 286, 288, 335 Mediterranean diet and, 177, 187, 198 pastries, 42, 140, 223, 226–27, 237 peanut oil, 8, 25–26, 86, 199, 279 Pediatrics, 147–48 Pennington, Alfred, 316 and hormones in obesity, 296–97, 311 low-carbohydrate diet of, 294, 296–98 People, 125, 169 Pepperidge Farm, 229, 230, 235, 251 Percy, Charles H., 120 performance effect, 80 Philippines, 56, 232, 234 Phinney, Stephen D., 86n, 303–6, 311 pigs, pork, 16, 73, 84, 88, 114, 148, 246, 289, 293n, 336 Pinckney, Edward R., 46n, 331 placebo effect, 80 plaque, 15, 128 children and, 155–56 cholesterol and, 21, 23n, 317n heart disease and, 20n, 21, 30, 62, 142n Poli, Giuseppi, 281, 283 Pollan, Michael, 13, 191, 313 polyunsaturated fats, 26, 176, 187n, 282–85, 325 AHA and, 49, 241, 279 cancer and, 125, 167, 284 chemical structure of, 25, 199n, 282 children and, 147, 157 cholesterol and, 32, 85 margarine and, 33, 76, 85, 91 political issues and, 106, 125 research on, 74, 76–79, 94n, 210, 279–80, 284 vegetable oils and, 8, 16, 25, 83, 85–87, 85, 102, 167, 199n, 282–84, 333 popcorn, 82, 228, 237 Popper, Karl, 57 Portugal, 34, 185, 187 potatoes, 112, 180, 186, 195, 207, 270 poultry, 112, 120 clinical trials and, 73, 213n history of consumption of, 115, 115, 116 Mediterranean diet and, 174, 187, 188, 207, 213n, 219 USDA and, 186, 188 see also chicken; turkey Prentice, Andrew M., 157 Prentice, George, 15, 301 Prevención con Dieta Mediterránea (PREDIMED), 214–16 Pritikin, Nathan, 104, 139–40 Procter & Gamble (P&G), 194n, 228, 236 and AHA, 47–48, 85 and hydrogenated oils, 87–88, 239–40, 244 and trans fats, 249–50, 252, 256 and vegetable oils, 85, 87–88 protective foods, 149–50, 207 proteins, 29, 101, 107, 124, 191, 281n, 288, 297, 304, 309n, 315n, 334–35 Atkins and, 287, 290, 310n children and, 148, 152 heart disease and, 24, 34, 35n Mediterranean diet and, 188, 219 USDA and, 188, 328 prudent diet, 53, 73, 95 AHA and, 48–49, 52, 90, 241 Ahrens and, 101–2 clinical trials and, 74, 76, 127, 130, 137–38 vegetable oils and, 82, 86, 91 Putting Meat on the American Table (Horowitz), 114–15 Quaker Oats, 91, 105–6, 126, 137, 235 randomization, 37 rapeseeds, rapeseed oil, 84, 86, 337 Ravnskov, Uffe, 23, 45 Regional Medical Programs Service, 69 Reiser, Raymond, 61–62, 79n Renaud, Serge, 192 rice, 4, 14, 59, 157, 187, 302 Rifkind, Basil, 127, 129–33 Ronk, Richard J., 235 Roseto, Pa., 55–57, 97 Rossouw, Jacques, 170 Ryther, Robert, 277–78 Sacks, Frank M., 140, 310n safflower seeds, safflower oil, 8, 25–26, 75, 84, 176, 199, 282, 337 salad dressings, 24, 82, 85, 149, 169, 173, 199 salads, 28, 117, 149, 335 salt, 120, 222n, 305 Samburus, 11–12, 101 saturated fats, 1–4, 11, 14, 26, 86, 90, 97, 102, 136, 139, 185, 201, 225–37, 244, 248, 284–86, 288, 308n, 316–31, 333–34 AHA and, 49–50, 240, 306, 319–20 Ahrens and, 26–27, 31, 58, 122 campaigns against, 228–31, 237 chemical structure of, 25, 267, 282 children and, 147, 152, 154–55, 157–58 cholesterol and, 26–27, 31–32, 44, 50, 61, 131, 159, 161, 163–64, 228, 253, 285, 316–23, 325–27, 330, 334 Consensus Conference and, 132, 132 and domesticated and wild animals, 16–17 fat-cancer hypothesis and, 166–67 food labeling and, 235–36, 268–69 heart disease and, 3, 6, 13, 19, 33, 38–40, 49, 51, 54, 58, 61, 66, 73–74, 76–77, 80, 97n–98n, 98–100, 112, 122, 132, 159, 175–76, 218, 222, 228–31, 234, 314n, 318, 320–21, 324, 326 high-fat diet and, 302, 308n, 330 in history, 114, 336 Keys and, 19, 31–32, 38–39, 44, 50, 51, 54, 61, 73–74, 106–7, 176, 178, 226, 258, 264, 316, 320 Krauss and, 316, 318–20, 323–24, 329 limits on consumption of, 319–22, 327 Mann and, 66–67 meat and, 6, 106–7, 320 Mediterranean diet and, 175, 187n, 216, 218–20, 222, 320 political issues and, 104, 106, 112, 119–22, 126, 228, 232–33, 235–37 sources of, 8, 14n, 25–26, 230, 320 and studies and trials, 38–40, 44, 66–67, 73–76, 78, 80, 93, 96, 97n–98n, 98–99, 129, 131, 137–38, 152, 154, 169–70, 178, 210, 216, 256, 308n, 321–22, 324, 326, 334, 336 trans fats and, 253, 256, 267 tropical oils and, 230, 232–37 women and, 159, 164–65, 167, 169–71, 322 sauces, 2, 88, 145n, 157–58, 173, 177, 198, 270, 334 sausage, 89, 244, 289, 335 Schaefer, Otto, 298–302 Schatzkin, Arthur, 168 Schaur, Rudolf Jörg, 282 Science, 124, 127, 130, 133, 147, 240, 311 seeds, 84, 149, 207, 210–11, 287 selection bias, 56–57, 95 Senate Select Committee on Nutrition and Human Needs, 104–6, 112, 119–21, 123n, 124, 126–27, 146, 166, 182 Atkins and, 288–89 Serra-Majem, Lluís, 211–12, 214, 216, 222–24 sesame oil, 56, 84 Seven Countries study, 191n Crete and, 38–41, 176, 177, 178, 216–18, 220, 222–23 diet-heart hypothesis and, 37, 39, 42–45, 53, 72 Greece and, 37–41, 176, 192, 195, 216 heart disease and, 37–39, 42, 178, 216, 223 of Keys, 36–45, 55n, 62, 72, 74, 96, 176–78, 195, 216–20, 222–23 Mediterranean diet and, 176–78, 192, 206, 216–18, 220, 222–23 nutritional data in, 38, 40–41, 55n paradoxical outcomes in, 39–40 saturated fats and, 38–40, 44, 74, 178 sugar and, 42–43, 223 Seventh-day Adventist study, 108–10 sex, sexuality, 21, 289–90 Shai, Iris, 310, 315 Shaper, A.

Beyond Bigger Leaner Stronger: The Advanced Guide to Building Muscle, Staying Lean, and Getting Strong
by Michael Matthews
Published 15 Jun 2014

They do it all because they don’t want you to realize a simple truth of this industry: supplements don’t build great physiques. Dedication to proper training and nutrition does. You see, the supplement companies are cashing in BIG on a little trick that your mind can play on you known as the placebo effect. This is the scientifically proven fact that your simple belief in the effectiveness of a medicine or supplement can make it work. People have overcome every form of illness you can imagine, mental and physical, by taking substances they believed to have therapeutic value but didn’t. I’m talking about things like treating cancer and diabetes, eliminating depression and anxiety, and lowering blood pressure and cholesterol levels by taking medically worthless substances that people believed were treatments for their problems.

Spam Nation: The Inside Story of Organized Cybercrime-From Global Epidemic to Your Front Door
by Brian Krebs
Published 18 Nov 2014

“This says a number of things, and one is that a lot of people who bought from these programs were satisfied,” Savage said, noting, however, that many of the repeat customers were purchasing controlled and habit-forming prescription drugs, including painkillers. “Maybe the drugs they bought had a great placebo effect, but my guess is these are satisfied customers and they came back because of that.” ♦ ♦ ♦ By far the most important question about the pills pimped by the spam business is the efficacy and safety of the drugs. I interviewed hundreds of U.S. residents who purchased prescription drugs from the pharmacy sites advertised through SpamIt, and received a panpoly of responses about the effectiveness of these pills.

A Natural History of Beer
by Rob DeSalle
Published 14 Jun 2019

This brew includes several ingredients (including salt) that are not commonly used by brewers: ginger, vitamin B12, and willow bark. Each of these ingredients has a theoretical function in preventing the symptoms of a hangover, but their efficacy still needs to be tested scientifically to rule out a placebo effect. This research is on our agenda. The Er Boquerón hangover-free beer contains about 5 percent alcohol, or about four teaspoons of pure alcohol per bottle. That is quite normal as beer goes. Once a beer has been swallowed, the digestive system breaks most of it down into particles that the body can use.

Chasing My Cure: A Doctor's Race to Turn Hope Into Action; A Memoir
by David Fajgenbaum
Published 9 Sep 2019

So if it worked, the success would suggest that immune system activation was the underlying culprit, not something intrinsic to my enlarged lymph nodes. I felt better within hours of the IVIg infusion. The fatigue subsided. The nausea passed. I resisted celebrating. I considered the possibility that my mind was tricking my body: the placebo effect. I considered the reality that it was unlikely I’d just unlocked a secret of a disease that had stymied researchers for decades. But the improvements in my blood tests were dramatic and undeniable. My level of CRP—the greatest marker of my disease and a sign of inflammation—had plummeted from 42 to below 10, back to normal.

The Dark Cloud: How the Digital World Is Costing the Earth
by Guillaume Pitron
Published 14 Jun 2023

Metros’, IEEE Communications Society, 19 December 2017. 23 ‘5G’s rollout speeds along faster than expected, even with the coronavirus pandemic raging’, CNET, 30 November 2020. 24 ‘Canalys: 278 million 5G smartphones to be sold in 2020’, GSM Arena, 10 September 2020. 25 Keynote by Michèle Rivasi, Member of European Parliament with Europe Écologie les Verts, at the conference La 5G: avancée technologique, recul écologique? [‘5G: technological advance or ecological decline?’], La Recyclerie, Paris, 9 March 2020. 26 Such fears fall under what doctors call the ‘the nocebo effect’, which is characteristic of our modern, risk-averse societies. Unlike the placebo effect, the nocebo effect occurs when a patient believes they are suffering the effect of what is in fact an inert substance that has been presented as an active medication. 27 ‘It is wholly a confusion of ideas to suppose that the economical use of fuel is equivalent to a diminished consumption.

Branded Beauty
by Mark Tungate
Published 11 Feb 2012

• Renaissance beauties like Diane de Poitiers believed that drinking gold potions granted them a more youthful appearance. Gold is still used in some beauty products today. • While moisturizer improves the appearance of the skin, there is scant evidence that anti-wrinkle creams have any significant impact, although they do have a placebo effect. • Consumers are wary of the claims made by the marketers of anti-ageing creams, but feel that taking action is better than doing nothing: ‘more hope than help’. • They agree that creams can defend against future damage to the skin, particularly from overexposure to the sun. • Fear of ageing has spawned an ‘immortality business’, with doctors, scientists and thinkers considering ways in which we might live forever

4th Rock From the Sun: The Story of Mars
by Nicky Jenner
Published 5 Apr 2017

Any plants or foods that are red, spicy, stimulating or related to blood are thus given to Mars – chilli peppers, raspberries, radishes, cranberries, garlic (which ‘removes toxins and cleanses your blood’ – pure pseudoscience, so please don’t rely on this as diet advice), root ginger, bitter coffee, black pepper, paprika, any kind of curry spice, whisky, so-called aphrodisiac foods (again, not diet advice – ‘aphrodisiac foods’ largely rely on the placebo effect) and so on. To connect to your ‘Mars energy’, a magick practitioner should integrate the colour red into their clothing and surroundings, perform Mars-specific rituals on a Tuesday (Mars day!) and light candles to bring fire into the room. If you fancy summoning Mars energy into your life, try wrapping yourself in red when you have a free Tuesday evening and enjoy a feast composed of spicy or red foods (bonus marks for both).

Quarantine
by Greg Egan
Published 13 Dec 1994

Letters cut into imitation black marble don’t exactly catch the eye, but perhaps that’s intentional; after all, Axon grew out of a company which peddled ‘subliminal learning tools’—audio and video tapes bearing inaudible or invisible messages, supposedly perceived ‘directly’ by the subconscious. Like all the other self-improvement snake oil of the time, this did more than provide placebo effects for the gullible and megabucks for the rip-off merchants; it also helped create the market for a technology that did work, once such a thing was actually invented. I unpack, shower, belatedly put all the clocks in my head forward one-and-a-half hours, then sit on the bed and try to decide exactly how I’m going to find Laura in a city of twelve million people.

In Pursuit of Memory: The Fight Against Alzheimer's
by Joseph Jebelli
Published 30 Oct 2017

Sixty-eight years old, the man reportedly took the drug every day for twenty-three months and was monitored by a team at the Université catholique de Louvain, in Brussels, Belgium.7 Tantalisingly, his memory somewhat improved and he scored higher in several tests of cognition. The problem, as one would expect, is that there was no way to rule out a placebo effect. And so this anecdotal case fossilised as just that: anecdotal, informal, unreliable. ‘You’ve just got to take it for what it’s worth,’ Landreth made clear to me. ‘It supports the idea, but you certainly wouldn’t base any subsequent action on a case report.’ But where were the human trials? I wondered.

Surprisingly Down to Earth, and Very Funny: My Autobiography
by Limmy
Published 21 Feb 2019

I took one of the pills that day, then went to bed that night. I woke up the very next morning a changed man. I am not exaggerating. I’d been waking up every morning with this big deflated sigh, this feeling of doom. But that morning I woke up feeling fit as a fiddle. I thought that it had to be my imagination, it had to be the placebo effect, because it said they took weeks to kick in. But I felt better than I’d felt for fucking ages. As the weeks went on, I felt the pills take more of an effect. I didn’t feel down. I didn’t feel pessimistic. I felt happy. And I didn’t feel unnaturally happy. I didn’t feel like I’d be smiling and laughing at a funeral or anything.

Busy
by Tony Crabbe
Published 7 Jul 2015

Brian Wansink, Mindless Eating: Why We Eat More Than We Think (New York: Bantam, 2006). 8. Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, The Progress Principle: Using Small Wins to Ignite Joy, Engagement, and Creativity at Work (Boston, MA: Harvard Business Review Press, 2011). 9. Alia J. Crum and Ellen J. Langer, “Mind-set Matters: Exercise and the Placebo Effect,” Association for Psychological Science 18, no. 2 (2007): 165–71. 10. Example given in Chip Heath and Dan Heath, Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard (New York: Broadway Books, 2010). 11. Amy Arnsten cited in David Rock, Your Brain at Work: Strategies for Overcoming Distraction, Regaining Focus, and Working Smarter All Day Long (New York: HarperBusiness, 2009). 12.

Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon Self-Control, and My Other Experiments in Everyday Life
by Gretchen Rubin
Published 3 Sep 2012

If I’d been trying to get rid of neck pain, for instance, I’d know if acupuncture had made a difference, but did the session contribute to my feelings of “general wellness”? Not that I noticed. I did some research. Studies on the efficacy of acupuncture aren’t very convincing, and they suggest that when it does work, its benefits are largely due to the placebo effect. That being said, placebos are often quite effective, especially for disorders that are largely subjective or involve pain. Well, if I thought I felt better, I did feel better. But I didn’t feel better. Just the same. Apart from the scientific view, I considered my own experience. An acupuncture session cost me time and money.

Wonderland: How Play Made the Modern World
by Steven Johnson
Published 15 Nov 2016

In Middlemarch, George Eliot described this process, evoking the history of alchemy and its delusions, but it could just as easily be applied to the sham medicine of the spicers: “Doubtless a vigorous error vigorously pursued has kept the embryos of truth a-breathing: the quest of gold being at the same time a questioning of substances, the body of chemistry is prepared for its soul, and Lavoisier is born.” Mostly these folk remedies were harmless, medically speaking; given the placebo effect, they might well have had a slightly beneficial impact. But, at least once, the use of spices as medicine seems to have backfired in a truly catastrophic way. The aromas of Oriental spice were said to combat the miasmatic air that conveyed plague. An Oxford fellow named John of Eschenden recommended “a powder of cinnamon, aloes, myrrh, saffron, mace, and cloves” to ward off the Black Death.

The End of My Addiction
by Olivier Ameisen
Published 23 Dec 2008

Moreover, the necessity for life-long baclofen treatment could be studied in the newly described addiction model in rats (Deroche-Gamonet et al., 2004). The major limitation of this report is that it is a self-case report, not a study. But it suggests a new concept of treatment: the blockade of the expression of substance dependence symptoms with simultaneous intervention on anxiety. This case could result from a placebo effect, but I believe this to be unlikely since there has been no report of such complete and prolonged effects in clinical trials. The efficacy of high-dose baclofen should be tested for reproducibility in randomized trials under strict medical surveillance to confirm the validity of the concept of dose-dependent suppression of symptoms of alcohol dependence.

Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less Are Thekeys to Sustainability
by David Owen
Published 16 Sep 2009

A copy of the study summary can be found at: http://www.dot.state.mn.us/rampmeterstudy/pdf/execsummary/executivesummary.pdf. 45 The website of Transportation Alternatives can be found at: www.transalt.org. 46 Newman and Kenworthy, Sustainability and Cities, p. 183. 47 “A Bolder Plan: Balancing Free Transit and Congestion Pricing in New York City,” Nurture New York’s Nature, Inc. A digital copy of the proposal can be found at: www.nnyn.org/kheelplan. 48 Ori Brafman and Rom Brafman, Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior (New York: Currency/Doubleday, 2008), pp. 48-49. For the SoBe study, see Baba Shif, Ziv Carmon, and Dan Ariely, “Placebo Effects of Marketing Actions: Consumers May Get What They Pay For,” Journal of Marketing Research, November 2005, .http://www predictablyirrational.com/pdfs/Placebo1.pdf. 49 “A Bolder Plan,” pp. 14-15, 24. 50 Jeff Sabatini, “Daimler’s Minicar: More Charming Than Smart,” The Wall Street Journal, March 21, 2008. 51 Eric A.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class
by Guy Standing
Published 27 Feb 2011

Richard Tomkins (2009) cited fortytwo universities offering eighty-four courses in subjects such as reflexology, aromatherapy, acupuncture and herbal medicine, including fifty-one BSc degree courses. They reflect an ‘Endarkenment’, a drift from rationalist Enlightenment thinking to an emotional way of thinking associated with religion and superstition. In the absence of evidence, advocates of alternative medicine cite patient testimonials. And there is a placebo effect from treatment in which there is faith. Commodifying higher education legitimises irrationality. Any course is acceptable if there is a demand for it, if it can be sold to consumers willing to pay the price. Anybody can take a pseudo-course giving a credentialist degree ‘because you’re worth it’, which means because you or your parents can pay and because we are here to give you what you want, not what we believe to be scientific or valid based on generations of knowledge.

How Doctors Think
by Jerome Groopman
Published 15 Jan 2007

At the time, physicians believed that the procedure would increase blood flow to a heart starved of its normal supply by blockages in the coronary arteries. Then, at the end of the decade, a clinical trial showed that patients who had a sham operation did just as well as those who had the real one. Apparently, the placebo effect accounted for the fact that many patients felt better after the surgery. Other once popular procedures resulted from a misunderstanding of the biology of a particular condition. William Halstead pioneered the radical mastectomy in 1895 at the Johns Hopkins Hospital; it became routine therapy for breast cancer.

The Power of Glamour: Longing and the Art of Visual Persuasion
by Virginia Postrel
Published 5 Nov 2013

Mayer, British Cinemas and Their Audiences: Sociological Studies (London: Dennis Dobson Ltd., 1948) p. 85. The desire to travel comes up repeatedly in these responses. 11. The market for patent medicines, formerly the mainstay of American magazine advertising, collapsed around this time. Competition from aspirin, which offered more than a placebo effect, combined with federal regulation to wipe out much of the industry. Charles Goodrum and Helen Dalrymple, Advertising in America: The First 200 Years (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1990) p. 35. 12. The thirties gave birth to such magazines as Life (1936), Mademoiselle (1935), and Glamour (1939) in the United States; Woman’s Own (1932), Woman (1937), and Picture Post (1938) in the United Kingdom, and Marie Claire (1937) in France.

The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home
by Dan Ariely
Published 31 May 2010

Unfortunately for both of you, you didn’t have the benefit of modern technology back then, so you couldn’t know that a tear in the cartilage was the real culprit. Nor was there much research on the effectiveness of rest, the influence of attention from a person wearing a white coat, or the many other forms of the placebo effect (about which I wrote in some length in Predictably Irrational). Of course, physicians are not bad people; on the contrary, they are good and caring. The reason that most of them picked their profession is to make people healthy and happy. Ironically, it is their goodness and their desire to help each and every one of their patients that makes it so difficult for them to sacrifice some of their patients’ well-being for the sake of an experiment.

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn From Data
by David Spiegelhalter
Published 2 Sep 2019

The correlation was −0.60, and some theory shows that if the rankings were complete chance and all that was operating were regression-to-the-mean, the correlation would be expected to be −0.71, not very different from what was observed.4 This suggests the differences between countries were far less than claimed, and that changes in league position had little to do with changes in teaching philosophy. Regression-to-the-mean also operates in clinical trials. In the last chapter we saw that randomized trials were needed to evaluate new pharmaceuticals properly, since even people in the control arm showed benefit—the so-called placebo effect. This is often interpreted to mean that just taking a sugar pill (preferably a red one) actually has a beneficial effect on people’s health. But much of the improvement seen in people who do not receive any active treatment may be regression-to-the-mean, since patients are enrolled in trials when they are showing symptoms, and many of these would have resolved anyway.

Singular Intimacies: Becoming a Doctor at Bellevue
by Danielle Ofri
Published 31 Mar 2003

Ask John, he knows . . . especially when I’m in hospitals. I get so scared.” His hair was plastered to his forehead with sweat and his pupils were as wide as cat’s eyes. But how could I leave him in this state? The poor guy was terrified. I asked the nurse for a tiny dose of a sedative, hoping for a placebo effect. Before I injected it, I sent off an arterial blood gas to check his oxygen status. “At nine P.M. the patient was being readied to go to radiology, but his blood pressure was still low and he was complaining of increased anxiety. A blood gas was sent and 0.5 mg of IV midazolam was administered.”

Been There, Done That: A Rousing History of Sex
by Rachel Feltman
Published 14 May 2022

Without attachment to a blood supply, one expert witness in the libel suit testified, the grafted tissue was merely a foreign object akin to a splinter—and would either dissolve or form a scar. Far from infusing his patients with superpowered ungulate sexuality, Brinkley was merely exposing them to a risk of infection or rejection in the hope of inducing a dramatic placebo effect. And the formula he replaced those sham surgeries with? An independent chemical analysis revealed it to be one thousand parts distilled water mixed with one part blue dye. He sold the injections at a hundred bucks a pop, and each patient received an average of five. Brinkley may be the most infamous testicle salesman in history, but he wasn’t alone.

The Age of Wonder
by Richard Holmes
Published 15 Jan 2008

Though not a religious man, Feynman believed that science was driven by a continual dialogue between sceptical enquiry and the sense of inexplicable mystery, and that if either got the upper hand true science would be destroyed. See James Gleick, Richard Feynman and Modern Physics (1992). ♣ This is possibly the first scientific identification of the famous ‘placebo effect’, although it would not be properly tested and defined until the 1950s. It has been claimed that over 30 per cent of all patients show a ‘placebo’ response, most notably in cases of depression, heart disease and chronic muscular pain. This figure has recently been questioned, since the earlier trials may have been methodologically flawed (they lacked a neutral ‘control’ group of patients); and the definition of ‘cure’ itself is open to a high degree of subjective distortion. e.g.

…

.): Journal of a Voyage on…the Endeavour, 44 Parkinson, Sydney: on Endeavour voyage, 11, 14; on Banks’s humanity, 15; drawings, 15, 48; troubled by flies, 17; on promiscuity in Tahiti, 18; on Banks’s quarrel with Monkhouse, 29; on leaving Tahiti, 35; death in Batavia, 40, 45; drawings officially appropriated, 44; journal published, 44-5 Parliamentary Select Committee on Mining Accidents (1835), 375 Parry, William Edward, 51, 232, 395-6, 404-5 Paulze, Marie-Anne see Lavoisier, Marie-Anne Payne, William, 348 Peacock, Thomas Love, 233 Peel, Sir Robert: friendship with Davy, 403-4 Peninsular War, 347 Pennant, Thomas, 12, 40-1 Penzance, 236-7, 239, 241, 268, 400 & n Penzance Grammar School, 434 Periodic Table, 247 Philosophical Magazine, 286 Phipps, Captain Constantine John (later 2nd Baron Mulgrave), 9 phlogiston theory, 245 Physical and Medical Knowledge, principally in the West of England (Beddoes’s annual), 154 Pilâtre de Rozier, Jean-François: ballooning, 129-31, 133, 148-9, 152, 161; killed on cross-Channel balloon flight, 153-5 Pisania, West Africa, 214-16 Pitt, John, 165, 182 Pitt, Mary see Herschel, Mary, Lady Pitt, Paul, 165, 183-4, 202 Pitt, William, the Younger, 138, 223, 252 placebo effect, 314n Plato: on wonder, xx Playfair, John, 294, 315, 338, 369-70 Pneumatic Institute, Bristol, 235, 251, 253, 255-7, 265, 272, 278, 282, 285-6 pneumatics: as science and study, 245 Poe, Edgar Allan, 464 polar exploration, 395, 404-5 Pole Star: Herschel identifies as two, 87 Polidori, Dr William: travels with Byron, 307, 327; and Ritter, 330; ‘The Vampyre’, 327 Polwhele, Richard: ‘The Pneumatic Revellers’, 273 Poole, Tom, 265, 293, 353, 362, 401, 419-20, 424 Pope, Alexander: Essay on Man, 322 Porter, Roy: The Greatest Benefit to Mankind, 303n potassium: Davy discovers, 297-8 Potin (Swedish scientist), 296 Presumption: or The Fate of Frankenstein (play), 334-5 Priestley, Joseph: friendship with Joseph Wright of Derby, xix; Banks recruits for expedition, 47; discovers hydrogen with Cavendish, 127; and early ballooning, 137, 158; Blake satirises, 143; library burned by mob, 199; and phlogiston theory, 245; on photosynthesis, 245; on transformation processes, 247; Marie-Anne Paulze (Lavoisier) translates into French, 248; considers nitrous oxide lethal, 259; in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 328; Davy praises, 344; British Association drinks to health of, 447; Experiments on Different Kinds of Air, 127 Prix Napoléon: awarded to Davy, 299, 353 Provence, Josephine (of Savoy), Comtesse de (‘Madame’), 129 Public Characters: Biographical Memoirs of Distinguished Subjects (series), 200, 303 Quarterly Review, 317-18, 446, 449 Queensberry, William Douglas, 4th Duke of, 177 race: classification, 311 Radcliffe, Ann, 53 Raffles, Sir Thomas Stamford, 404 rainbow, 319, 321, 323-4, 443 Ray, Martha, 53 Regent’s Park: zoological gardens, 404 religion: and science, 313 & n, 317-20, 449-50, 459 Rennell, Major John: ‘Sketch of the Northern Parts of Africa’, 212 Resolution, HMS, 47 Resonico, Prince, 168 respiration, 245-6, 259 Revesby, 52 Reynolds, Sir Joshua: portrait of Banks, 43; portrait of Omai, 51; impressed by Lunardi’s ballooning, 140-1 Richmond, Tom, 14 Rickman, John, 53, 264 Ridley, Matthew, 429n Ritchie, Joseph, 234 Ritter, Johann Wilhelm, 315, 328-30; Fragments of a Young Physicist, 329 Robert, M.

Full Catastrophe Living (Revised Edition): Using the Wisdom of Your Body and Mind to Face Stress, Pain, and Illness
by Jon Kabat-Zinn
Published 23 Sep 2013

Another important element pointing toward the need to include a role for the mind in a more accurate model of health and illness has always been the placebo effect, a very well-known phenomenon for which the standard biomedical model had no explanation. Numerous studies over the years have shown time and time again that when people believe that they are taking a drug of a particular potency, they show significant clinical effects typical of the drug in question, even when they did not actually receive the drug but only a sugar pill, known as a placebo. Sometimes the magnitude of the placebo effect comes close to the magnitude of the drug itself. This phenomenon can only be explained by assuming that the very suggestion that you are taking a powerful drug in some way influences the brain and nervous system to create conditions in the body similar to those produced on a molecular level by the presence of the drug.

Junk DNA: A Journey Through the Dark Matter of the Genome
by Nessa Carey
Published 5 Mar 2015

A single nucleotide difference that alters splicing patterns distinguishes the SMA gene SMN1 from the copy gene SMN2. Hum Mol Genet. 1999 Jul;8(7):1177–83 20. Cooper TA, Wan L, Dreyfuss G. RNA and disease. Cell. 2009 Feb 20;136(4):777–93 21. http://quest.mda.org/news/dmd-drisapersen-outperforms-placebo-walking-test 22. http://www.fiercebiotech.com/story/glaxosmithklines-duchenne-md-drug-mirrors-placebo-effect-phiii/2013-10-07 Chapter 18 1. Ameres SL, Zamore PD. Diversifying microRNA sequence and function. Nat Rev Mol Cell Biol. 2013 Aug;14(8):475–88 2. For a more detailed description of classes of smallRNAs, see Castel SE, Martienssen RA. RNA interference in the nucleus: roles for small RNAs in transcription, epigenetics and beyond.

Personal Development for Smart People: The Conscious Pursuit of Personal Growth
by Steve Pavlina
Published 14 Oct 2008

Your beliefs should allow you to experience whatever is technically possible; they should never mislabel the possible as impossible. Subject, of course, to ethical and moral considerations, your beliefs shouldn't unduly limit your abilities. If y o u think something is impossible for y o u , then it must truly be impossible, regardless of your thinking. If a mental shift w o u l d alter your abilities via the placebo effect, then your belief is both disempowering and inaccurate. Take a m o m e n t to write d o w n some of your current beliefs about reality. W h a t do y o u believe to be true about your health, career, relationships, finances, spirituality, and so on? Then go over the eight criteria above to see how your beliefs measure up.

Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection
by John T. Cacioppo
Published 9 Aug 2009

The more strongly individuals were attached to Chinese traditions, the more years of life they lost.3 So the idea of sympathetic threads, or the idea that “our actions run as causes, and they come back to us as effects,” cannot be entirely dismissed as hocus-pocus. There is such a thing as “cause at a distance” even within the highly rational realm of physics, and magnetism and gravity are two examples that come readily to mind. If you read about health in the newspapers, you are no doubt also familiar with the placebo effect, whereby patients respond positively to the actions of physicians even when those actions are neutral. Pills with no active ingredients—placebos—are administered as a control measure in clinical trials in order to measure the specific action of the new drug being tested versus the therapeutic benefit of simply interacting with the patient and appearing to do something—anything—for them.

Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction
by Philip Tetlock and Dan Gardner
Published 14 Sep 2015

Some days, you feel fine; others, you feel some pain but not a lot; and occasionally it’s awful. Of course it’s when you have one of those awful days that you are most likely to seek help by visiting a homeopath or some other dispenser of medical treatments unsupported by solid scientific evidence. The next day you wake up and … you feel better! The treatment works! The placebo effect may have helped, but you probably would have felt better the next day even if you had received no treatment at all—thanks to regression to the mean, a fact that won’t occur to you unless you stop and think carefully, instead of going with the tip-of-your-nose conclusion. This modest little mistake is responsible for many of the things people believe but shouldn’t.

Breath: The New Science of a Lost Art
by James Nestor
Published 25 May 2020

Olympic swim team in history. Hypoventilation training fell back into obscurity after several studies in the 1980s and 1990s argued that it had little to no impact on performance and endurance. Whatever these athletes were gaining, the researchers reported, must have been based on a strong placebo effect. In the early 2000s, Dr. Xavier Woorons, a French physiologist at Paris 13 University, found a flaw in these studies. The scientists critical of the technique had measured it all wrong. They’d been looking at athletes holding their breath with full lungs, and all that extra air in the lungs made it difficult for the athletes to enter into a deep state of hypoventilation.

Sleepyhead: Narcolepsy, Neuroscience and the Search for a Good Night
by Henry Nicholls
Published 1 Mar 2018

With the evidence that light and melatonin have a key role in keeping the circadian rhythm to time, so an industry has emerged marketing light boxes and melatonin tablets, suggesting that even those without sleep disorders stand to benefit from more light and supplementary melatonin. If there is no underlying circadian disorder, however, such interventions are unlikely to improve sleep, says Zeitzer. At best these measures will be costly but largely ineffective, bringing about negligible improvements to sleep that could easily be attributed to the placebo effect. At worst, artificial light and melatonin tablets, if delivered in the wrong dose or at the wrong time of day, could actually upset the SCN’s careful orchestration of the body and, hence, sleep. That said, there’s considerable promise in going beyond the basic light box to get much, much smarter about the way we interact with light

Hype: How Scammers, Grifters, and Con Artists Are Taking Over the Internet―and Why We're Following
by Gabrielle Bluestone
Published 5 Apr 2021

And they’re not even particularly good fakes either.195 According to SparkToro’s analysis, 35 percent of his following are quantified as “low-quality,” as “accounts that trigger 10+ different spam/fake follower signals.” And that’s up from the 50 percent Newsweek found in 2017,196 and even more surprising following Twitter’s supposed 2018 purge of fake accounts from the site that saw Katy Perry lose close to three million followers.197 But these influencers are learning that you can’t rely on the placebo effect to move product. Just ask Ariana Renee, an Instagram influencer with more than two million followers who wasn’t able to sell the minimum thirty-six T-shirts required for her company to launch. “It breaks my heart to have to write this post. I’ve poured my heart into this drop,” she wrote in a now-deleted post.

Owning the Sun
by Alexander Zaitchik
Published 7 Jan 2022

“But while there is yet time I hasten to wish that you may take a dose of your own poison by mistake, and enter swiftly into the damnation which you and all other patent medicine assassins have so remorselessly earned and do so richly deserve.”6 In fairness, there was good reason to seek out nostrums and settle for their questionable effects, including the as-yet-unnamed placebo effect. Until the advent of “scientific” medicine toward the end of the nineteenth century, the options available to physicians were rudimentary, meager, and full of pain. The foremost physician in early America, Benjamin Rush was a fanatical advocate of bleeding to treat just about any illness. The esteemed former surgeon general of the Continental Army advanced the view that all disease resulted from an excess in “capillary tension” and should be managed by heavy bleeding and purging.

Hormone Repair Manual
by Lara Briden
Published 14 Apr 2021

One of the more popular herbal medicines is black cohosh, which I don’t prescribe but will discuss briefly. Black cohosh Cimicifuga racemosa (black cohosh) is a popular herbal medicine for hot flushes that has undergone several clinical trials with mixed results. A 2010 meta-analysis concluded it may slightly improve menopausal symptoms, but much of that may be due to the placebo effect. How it works: Black cohosh does not contain significant amounts of phytoestrogens (despite early claims that it did). Its primary mechanism seems to be that it interacts with serotonin, dopamine and opioid receptors in the brain. What else you need to know: The exact quantity of the herb depends on the concentration of the formula.

The Mutant Project: Inside the Global Race to Genetically Modify Humans
by Eben Kirksey
Published 10 Nov 2020

When he took the blood samples out of the freezer and actually analyzed the results, he found that the experiment had not worked after all. The homemade gene therapy shots had not produced any extra follistatin in his blood. Hundreds of his followers tuned in for a YouTube broadcast where he publicly admitted to failure and chalked his big muscles up to the placebo effect. 12 I DON’T WANT TO WALK, I WANT TO FLY Gregor Wolbring, a biochemist who gets around in a wheelchair, is critical of entrepreneurs and scientists who champion gene therapies as miracle cures or as transformative tools of human enhancement. If everyone uses these tools to achieve the same unimaginative dreams—to grow big muscles or have blue eyes—then humanity will be stripped of character and biological diversity.

The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability
by Lierre Keith
Published 30 Apr 2009

Anthony Colpo describes what that perfect clinical trial would look like: Such a trial would compare a group of subjects of similar sex, age and health status, who have been randomly assigned to eat diets that are identical in every respect, except that one contains a significant amount of saturated fat (the control group), while the other contains a greatly reduced amount (the treatment group). Ideally, this trial would be ‘double-blind’, meaning that both researchers and participants would be unaware of who is in the treatment group and who is in the control group, a safeguard that would help prevent researcher bias and the possibility of a placebo effect amongst the subjects.78 In fact, such studies have been done, and done relentlessly, trying to prove some link between saturated fat, cholesterol, and CHD. Some of them meet standards that are scientifically rigorous; others must be read with a cautious and educated eye. The very first was designed by Lester M.

Moneyball
by Michael Lewis
Published 1 Jan 2003

Between phone calls to other general managers he explained how the purge he’d conducted back in May, in which he’d ditched players left and right, “probably had no effect. We were 21–26 at the time. That’s a small sample size. We’d have been fine if I’d done nothing.” The most he will admit is that perhaps his actions had some “placebo effect.” And the most astonishing thing of all is that he almost believes it. Two months later, he still didn’t want to talk about Jeremy Giambi. All that mattered was that the Oakland A’s were winning again. But they were still in third place in the absurdly strong American League West, and Billy worried that this year good might not be good enough.

QI: The Book of General Ignorance - The Noticeably Stouter Edition
by Lloyd, John and Mitchinson, John
Published 7 Oct 2010

According to Science News, placebos are more effective at curing depression than either drugs or herbal remedies. In a series of trials carried out between 1979 and 1996, Seattle psychiatrist Dr Arif Khan found that St John’s Wort completely cured 24 per cent of cases, the anti-depressant drug Zoloft cured 25 per cent of cases, but the sugar-pill placebos effected a complete cure in 32 per cent of patients. In a more recent study comparing the anti-depressants Prozac and Efexor with placebos, the drugs won with a 52 per cent cure rate, but the placebos still scored impressively with 38 per cent. But as soon as the deception was revealed, the patients’ condition worsened rapidly.

The Irrational Economist: Making Decisions in a Dangerous World
by Erwann Michel-Kerjan and Paul Slovic
Published 5 Jan 2010

It is no insult to those who pray to observe that a response to a reverent petition would be a miracle as defined above, “an event that appears unexplainable by the laws of nature and so is held to be supernatural in origin or an act of god.” I doubt whether the authenticity of prayer can be experimentally disproven. Prayer certainly has been shown to have a placebo effect. Whether the prayer itself can be deemed responsible for the success of the petition depends on whether the outcome can be identified with any certainty as not due to natural causes. Any negative results in an experiment designed for the purpose of testing the deity’s responsiveness would surely violate the Third Commandment and could be discarded on that account.

Predictive Analytics: The Power to Predict Who Will Click, Buy, Lie, or Die
by Eric Siegel
Published 19 Feb 2013

Predicting better than pure guesswork, even if not accurately, delivers real value. A hazy view of what’s to come outperforms complete darkness by a landslide. The Prediction Effect: A little prediction goes a long way. This is the first of five Effects introduced in this book. You may have heard of the butterfly, Doppler, and placebo effects. Stay tuned here for the Data, Induction, Ensemble, and Persuasion Effects. Each of these Effects encompasses the fun part of science and technology: an intuitive hook that reveals how it works and why it succeeds. The Field of Dreams People . . . operate with beliefs and biases. To the extent you can eliminate both and replace them with data, you gain a clear advantage.

Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That'll Improve And/or Ruin Everything
by Kelly Weinersmith and Zach Weinersmith
Published 16 Oct 2017

Although unlikely, it’s conceivable that this subpopulation of people who react poorly to the vaccine share a set of characteristics that create the negative side effect. If we could screen out these people, the vast majority of consumers could have access to this important vaccine. In reality, it’d probably be a bit more complex. That subpopulation may simply have been all the people who are prone to the placebo effect. But given the number of drugs that have failed to get to market over safety concerns, results like this may happen. And with better biostatistical analysis, current drugs could find new uses for difficult diseases. This may seem a little dorky, but it could be enormous. Currently, it costs over $2.5 billion to bring a new drug to market, and most drugs never make it to that point.

Nobody's Fool: Why We Get Taken in and What We Can Do About It
by Daniel Simons and Christopher Chabris
Published 10 Jul 2023

Asking ourselves what part of a product or treatment is doing the work—or whether there may be several active elements aside from the one we’ve been told about—helps us to see why it might appear to be more effective than it actually is. Most homeopathic remedies, for instance, include no more than a trivial amount of any active ingredient, and any perceived benefits are due to placebo effects and natural recovery. The same is true of Reiki and other “energy therapies” that involve detection and manipulation of energy fields, sometimes over long distances, to diagnose and treat disease. Neither the existence of such fields nor the ability of practitioners to affect them has been demonstrated scientifically.

Korea
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 1988

All I do know is this: when I take ginseng, I end up feeling pretty good. (Not that I feel bad if I don’t take it—there is no suggestion that ginseng is in any way addictive.) People tell me I look fitter than for some time. And I like the taste. Maybe it is all some mighty Korean confidence trick; maybe ginseng extracts have no more than a placebo effect, and one that works wonders on the suggestible psyches of people like me. I am well aware that I might be being taken for an almighty ride and that Mr Ha and his brother tricksters at Korea’s Office of Monopoly may well be laughing behind their hands at how all the yangnom fall for all this guff about saponins and terpenoids and help jolly along Korea’s millions of dollars in profits each year.

Zero History
by William Gibson
Published 6 Sep 2010

She’d gotten him to swallow five capsules of Cold-FX, taking three herself as a prophylactic measure. It usually didn’t seem to do anything, once symptoms were advanced, but the promise of it had gotten him around the corner and into the Starbucks on Golden Square, and she hoped he was prone to the placebo effect. She was herself, according to Inchmale, who was an adamant and outspoken Cold-FX denier. “You have to keep taking them,” she said to Clammy, placing the white plastic bottle beside his steaming paper cup of chamomile. “Ignore the instructions. Take three, three times a day.” He shrugged. “Where’d you say you got the Hounds?”

Bread, Wine, Chocolate: The Slow Loss of Foods We Love
by Simran Sethi
Published 10 Nov 2015

Freeman, 2002). 68.George Vierra, “Physiology of Odor and Flavor Perception,” Napa Valley College, December 2013, 1, http://www.napavalley.edu/people/gvierra/Documents/Sensory_Evaluation_of_Wine/Smelling%20and%20Tasting%20-%20Physiology.pdf. 69.“How Does Our Sense of Taste Work?” 70.Linda Bartoshuk, “Separate Worlds of Taste,” Psychology Today 14 (1980): 48–49, 51, 54–56, 63. 71.“Can Cheap Wine Taste Great? Brain Imaging and Marketing Placebo Effects,” Journal of Marketing Research (press release), April 29, 2015, https://www.ama.org/publications/JournalOfMarketingResearch/Documents/pr-jmr.13.0613-brain-imaging-wine-placebo.pdf. 72.“Can Cheap Wine Taste Great?” 73.Rey Gastón Loor et al., “Genetic Diversity and Possible Origin of the Nacional Cacao Type from Ecuador” (paper presented at the International Cocoa Research Conference, San José, Costa Rica, October 9–14, 2006). 74.Cristian J.

The Charisma Machine: The Life, Death, and Legacy of One Laptop Per Child
by Morgan G. Ames
Published 19 Nov 2019

Perhaps it was tinkering with the laptop itself, but perhaps the teacher training and the lectures and suggestions of visitors from OLPC and elsewhere provided teachers with excuses to reflect on pedagogical practices and to be encouraged to try new classroom arrangements and more child-centered learning models, as well as encouraging ongoing conversations around what worked best, which teachers were having the most success, and why. Even if some of these changes were due to a placebo effect motivated by the laptop’s presence, the results of the Phase I tests in 2010 and 2013 still suggest that this program made a small positive difference. Results for Phase II Schools The test results in Phase II schools were meant to provide the most solid evidence of the effects of the laptop.

The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom
by Jonathan Haidt
Published 26 Dec 2005

He gave ten of the students 30 milligrams of psilocybin; the other ten were given identical-looking pills containing vitamin B5 (nicotinic acid), which creates feelings of tingles and flushing on the skin. T h e vitamin B5 is what's known as an active placebo: It creates real bodily feelings, so if the beneficial effects of psilocybin were just placebo effects, the control group would have good reason to show them. Over the next few hours, the whole group listened (via speakers) to the G o o d Friday service going on in the chapel upstairs. Nobody, not even Pahnke, knew who had taken which pill. But two hours after the pills were taken, there could be no doubt.

The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes' Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant From Two Centuries of Controversy
by Sharon Bertsch McGrayne
Published 16 May 2011

In 1961 he taught probability and statistics on NBC’s early-morning Continental Classroom series; his lectures were viewed by more than a million people and taken for credit by 75,000. In medical research Mosteller pioneered meta-analysis and strongly advocated randomized clinical trials, fair tests of medical treatments, and data-based medicine. He was one of the first to conduct large-scale studies of placebo effects, evaluations of many medical centers, collaborations between physicians and statisticians, and the use of large, mainframe computers. How did Mosteller juggle a massive Bayesian analysis on top of his other work? He looked tubby and rumpled, but he was a superb organizer and utterly unfazed by controversy.

The Big Book of Words You Should Know: Over 3,000 Words Every Person Should Be Able to Use (And a Few That You Probably Shouldn't)
by David Olsen , Michelle Bevilacqua and Justin Cord Hayes
Published 28 Jan 2009

placebo (pluh-SEE-bo), noun A medicine having no fixed medical purpose or healing property given either to pacify a patient or, as a control method, to test the effectiveness of another drug. A placebo is administered as though it were a medication or drug, yet is neutral from a medical standpoint. Scientists are still uncertain as to exactly what causes the PLACEBO effect, in which some patients taking a “ fake” drug actually improve. placid (PLAH-sid), adjective Undisturbed; smooth. That which appears calm or undisturbed on the surface can be said to be placid. The PLACID country surroundings were just the change Caitlyn needed after three months in noisy Manhattan.

Overdosed America: The Broken Promise of American Medicine
by John Abramson
Published 20 Sep 2004

In other words, perhaps it was their greater propensity toward health or the absence of disease that led them to take the hormones, and not the reverse. The third possibility is that the women who took the hormones believed that they were doing something that would protect their health and that this placebo effect played a role in keeping them healthier. The Nurses’ Health Study researchers statistically adjusted their results for many potentially confounding factors: body weight, cigarette smoking, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, early heart attack in a parent, history of breast cancer in mother or sister, previous use of birth control pills, number of children, age of onset of period, diet, alcohol use, multivitamin use, vitamin E use, aspirin use, and regular exercise.

In the Company of Heroes
by Michael J. Durant and Steven Hartov
Published 1 Dec 2006

I had no bed, no food, no water, no medicine, no radio. But all I cared about was the incredible pain that wasn’t subsiding now, even as I lay still. The trip in the car had aced it. That splint had to come off. The fire in my thigh was incredibly intense, and I didn’t even have the aspirin now for a “placebo effect.” Firimbi squatted down beside me. I must have looked bad, because he looked pretty worried. I gripped his forearm, hard. “You’ve got to get the doctor,” I said. My voice was dry and raspy. “Dr. Kediye. Right now. This goddamn thing has got to come off.” I must have been fairly convincing, because he hustled out of the place.

Unknown Market Wizards: The Best Traders You've Never Heard Of
by Jack D. Schwager
Published 2 Nov 2020

I bought a couple of percent of the company. I tried the product, and it seemed to be working for me. What ailment did you have? I had herniated a disc a few years before, and I was taking Aleve every day. So this CBD water worked for you? It did, but it’s hard to know if it was the water or just a placebo effect. I started going to the store every day. I wanted to see who was buying the product. Did the manager think it was a bit odd that you were hanging out at the store every day? After the first day, I told him why I was there. I told him that I was interested in the stock and that I had bought a bunch of other CBD stocks as well.

Rationality: What It Is, Why It Seems Scarce, Why It Matters
by Steven Pinker
Published 14 Oct 2021

A jury hears eyewitness testimony in a trial. Is the defendant guilty, or did the witness misremember? We meet a person who seems vaguely familiar. Have we met her before, or is it a free-floating pang of déjà vu? A group of patients improves after taking a drug. Did the drug do anything, or was it a placebo effect? The output of statistical decision theory is not a degree of credence but an actionable decision: to have surgery or not, to convict or acquit. In coming down on one side or the other, we are not deciding what to believe about the state of the world. We’re committing to an action in expectation of its likely costs and benefits.

Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst
by Robert M. Sapolsky
Published 1 May 2017

Poke your finger with a pin and the ACC activates, along with those brain regions telling you which finger and what parameters of pain. Make someone believe that the inert cream you just smeared on his finger is a powerful painkiller, and when you poke his finger, the “it’s my finger, not my toe” circuitry still activates. But the ACC falls for the placebo effect and stays silent. Obviously the ACC receives inputs from interoceptive and exteroceptive outposts. Equally logically, it sends lots of projections into the sensorimotor cortex, making you very aware of and focused on the body part that hurts. But the sophistication of the ACC, the reason it sits up there in the frontal cortex, is apparent when considering another type of pain.

…

Gross, “Antecedent- and Response-Focused Emotion Regulation: Divergent Consequences for Experience, Expression, and Physiology,” JPSP 74 (1998): 224; J. Gross, “Emotion Regulation: Affective, Cognitive, and Social Consequences,” Psychophysiology 39 (2002): 281; K. Ochsner and J. Gross, “The Cognitive Control of Emotion,” TICS 9 (2005): 242. 69. M. Lieberman et al., “The Neural Correlates of Placebo Effects: A Disruption Account,” NeuroImage 22 (2004): 447; P. Petrovic et al., “Placebo and Opioid Analgesia: Imaging a Shared Neuronal Network,” Sci 295 (2002): 1737. 70. J. Beck, Cognitive Behavior Therapy, 2nd edition (New York: Guilford Press, 2011); P. Goldin et al., “Cognitive Reappraisal Self-Efficacy Mediates the Effects of Individual Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder,” J Consulting Clin Psych 80 (2012): 1034. 71.

House of God
by Samuel Shem
Published 1 Jan 1978

"No, Singer the sewing machine. He said, 'I don't give a damn for the invention, it's the dimes I'm after.' But listen, Basch, that laetrile idea the other night was dynamite. There's money there." "Laetrile? It's a hoax. Worthless. A placebo." "So what's wrong with placebos? Don't you know about the placebo effect?" "Of course I do." "Well, there you are. Placebos can relieve the pain of angina. If you're cooling from cancer, placebos are hot stuff. Like dyspareunia." "How?" I asked, my mind spinning around the simile. "You know what they say: It's better to have dyspareuned than never to have pareuned at all."

Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back
by Douglas Rushkoff
Published 1 Jun 2009

Most of the spiritual teachers in The Secret are wealth-seminar leaders who display the book’s logo on their ads and websites. The Secret has certainly worked wonders for its marketers: as of this writing, more than two million DVDs have been sold, and the book hit number one on the New York Times Best-Seller List of hardcover advice books. While positive thinking no doubt has its benefits—from the placebo effect to good old self-confidence—The Secret tries to justify itself not only in the language of pop psychology but also in that of modern physics. According to the book, happy thoughts will do more than affect behavior. The Secret claims that interrelatedness of matter and energy—Einstein’s E = mc2—allows people to change reality to their liking by changing the way they think about it.

The Science of Fear: How the Culture of Fear Manipulates Your Brain
by Daniel Gardner
Published 23 Jun 2009

But if it is a struggle to imagine, it will feel less likely for that reason alone. It may be a little surprising to think that the act of imagining can influence our thoughts, but in many different settings—from therapy to professional sports—imagining is used as a practical tool whose effectiveness is just as real as the famous placebo effect. Imagination is powerful. When the ads of lottery corporations and casinos invite us to imagine winning—one lottery’s slogan is “Just Imagine”—they do more than invite us to daydream. They ask us to do something that elevates our intuitive sense of how likely we are to win the jackpot—which is a very good way to convince us to gamble.

The Autoimmune Connection
by Rita Baron-Faust and Jill Buyon
Published 21 Apr 2003

Some drugs may make your condition worse or cause interactions with medications you’re taking (such as evening primrose oil and anticoagulants); many herbs should not be taken before surgery; and some herbs (like kava) may even be toxic to the liver. This is one area where you need to do your homework. Realize that many remedies have a powerful placebo effect—if you believe something is going to help you, chances are it will. It sounds weird, but if you have to have one of these diseases, this is a great time. They have made leaps and bounds in research. There is some real hope 378 The Autoimmune Connection for MS and other diseases, and you need to hang on to that hope.

Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs
by Johann Hari
Published 20 Jan 2015

I then read the original study: see American Psychologist, May 1990, 612–30. 20 Sullum, Saying Yes, 15. If that seems odd, remember the strong evidence showing that childhood trauma can actually physically stunt a child’s growth—and putting them into a loving home can make it start again. See Daniel E. Moerman, Meaning, Medicine and the Placebo Effect, 133. 21 Maté, Hungry Ghosts, 189. 22 Ebony, July 1949, 32. 23 Anslinger, Murderers, 174. 24 Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes 1, Memry Midgett interview. 25 Julia Blackburn archives, box 18, Linda Kuehl notes, vol. VIII, interview with Peter O’Brien and Michelle Wallace. 26 As explained to me by Liz Evans. 27 Maté, Hungry Ghosts, 75. 28 Ibid., 82–83. 29 Ibid., 84. 30 Ibid., 120. 31 Ibid., 118. 32 Maté, Hungry Ghosts, 21. 33 Ibid., 30.

Against Intellectual Monopoly
by Michele Boldrin and David K. Levine
Published 6 Jul 2008

Promoted as though it must be some sort of elixir, the ubiquitous “purple pill,” Nexium, is essentially AstraZeneca’s old heartburn drug Prilosec with a minor chemical twist that allowed the company to extend its patent. (Perhaps not coincidentally researchers have found that purple is a particularly good pill color for inducing placebo effects.)35 Sad but ironically true, me-too or copycat drugs are pretty much the only available tool capable of inducing some kind of competition in an otherwise monopolized market. Because patent protection lasts long enough to make future entry by generics nearly irrelevant, the limited degree of substitutabil-ity and price competition that copycat drugs bring about is actually valuable.

Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth
by Stuart Ritchie
Published 20 Jul 2020

In her book Lost in Math, the physicist Sabine Hossenfelder argues that physicists have gotten high on their own supply, focusing on the elegance and beauty of models such as string theory at the expense of being able to test, in practice, whether they’re actually true.77 Although the lofty, mathematical work of these string theorists feels like it could hardly be further from the (almost literally) kitchen-sink science of Brian Wansink, both kinds of research can become saturated with the same kinds of all-too-human biases. Nor are fields where lives are at stake safe from such biases. Generations of medical students have been taught, quite rightly, that the double-blind, randomised, placebo-controlled trial is the gold standard of evidence for new treatments. If done properly, such a trial rules out placebo effects, biases on the part of the doctors administering the intervention, spurious results due to factors other than the treatment (so-called ‘confounding’), and many other problems that bedevil clinical research. But even the most tightly controlled clinical trial can’t rule out bias that occurs after the results are in: bias when the data from the trial are being analysed.

The God Delusion
by Richard Dawkins
Published 12 Sep 2006

Part of what a doctor can give a patient is consolation and reassurance. This is not to be dismissed out of hand. My doctor doesn’t literally practise faith-healing by laying on of hands. But many’s the time I’ve been instantly ‘cured’ of some minor ailment by a reassuring voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope. The placebo effect is well documented and not even very mysterious. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why double-blind drug trials must use placebos as controls. It’s why homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they are so dilute that they have the same amount of active ingredient as the placebo control – zero molecules.

Science in the Soul: Selected Writings of a Passionate Rationalist
by Richard Dawkins
Published 15 Mar 2017

A non-negligible part of what a doctor can provide for a patient is consolation and reassurance. My doctor doesn’t literally practise the laying on of hands. But many’s the time I have been instantly cured of some minor ailment by a reassuringly calm voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope. The placebo effect is well documented. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why drug trials have to use placebos as controls. It’s why homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they’re so dilute that they have the same amount of the active ingredients as the placebo control – zero molecules.

The Transparent Society: Will Technology Force Us to Choose Between Privacy and Freedom?
by David Brin
Published 1 Jan 1998

Later, when the county went bankrupt in one of Americaʼs biggest financial scandals, Moorlachʼs earlier jeremiads appeared on journalistsʼ computer screens. He subsequently was hailed as a visionary. The idea of a predictions registry may have originated when Sir Francis Galton (1822—1911) attempted to perform experiments statistically measuring the efficacy of prayer. (He discovered what skeptics now call the “placebo effect.”) In the 1970s, efforts were made to catalog predictions using the crude technique of mailing postcards to a post office box in New York City, but sorting through shoe boxes did not prove an efficient or comprehensive method of correlating results, and the effort collapsed. The Internet has changed all that.

The River at the Centre of the World
by Simon Winchester
Published 1 Jan 1996

Dr Ho ground his plants to powder and soaked them in hot spring waters – trying them out on the villagers, varying the amounts and the mixes depending on the ailments presented and the age and sex of those he treated. Before long he had a following: the Chinese have always been eager for natural cures, for their own version of the Ayurvedic arts practised farther west, and Dr Ho's discoveries on the mountainsides seemed to work wonders, either from their chemistry or from their placebo effect. He next combined his newfound pharmaceutical skills with his professed lifelong commitment to the way of Taoism – a philosophy that in any case sets great store by internal hygiene, the quest for immortality, internal alchemy and healing. And in 1985, formally and with some ceremony attended by Taoist priests, he established himself as a full-blown Taoist herbal healer.

Data Science for Business: What You Need to Know About Data Mining and Data-Analytic Thinking
by Foster Provost and Tom Fawcett
Published 30 Jun 2013

When undertaking causal modeling, a business needs to weigh the trade-off of increasing investment to reduce the assumptions made, versus deciding that the conclusions are good enough given the assumptions. Even in the most careful randomized, controlled experimentation, assumptions are made that could render the causal conclusions invalid. The discovery of the “placebo effect” in medicine illustrates a notorious situation where an assumption was overlooked in carefully designed randomized experimentation. Discussing all of these tasks in detail would fill multiple books. In this book, we present a collection of the most fundamental data science principles—principles that together underlie all of these types of tasks.

Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow
by Yuval Noah Harari
Published 1 Mar 2015

8 As of 2016, transcranial stimulators are still in their infancy, and it is unclear if and when they will become a mature technology. So far they provide enhanced capabilities for only short durations, and even Sally Adee’s twenty-minute experience may be quite exceptional (or perhaps even the outcome of the notorious placebo effect). Most published studies of transcranial stimulators are based on very small samples of people operating under special circumstances, and the long-term effects and hazards are completely unknown. However, if the technology does mature, or if some other method is found to manipulate the brain’s electric patterns, what would it do to human societies and to human beings?

A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Shaped the World
by William J. Bernstein
Published 5 May 2009

Historians have suggested that rare spices were originally valued because of their medicinal properties. For example, one authority points out that the contents of a medieval French spice store and a nineteenth-century American pharmacy would have been nearly identical. But were these "drugs" effective? The placebo effect, one of the most powerful forces in the therapeutic armamentarium, derives in no small part from the exoticism of the ingredients or methods used. None of the spices mentioned in this chapter has any scientifically proven medicinal value, and those plant products that do are often quite common, such as the heart drug digitalis, from the lovely but lowly foxglove.

Riding Rockets: The Outrageous Tales of a Space Shuttle Astronaut
by Mike Mullane
Published 24 Jan 2006

But my situation was so perilous she wasn’t going to leave it just to heaven to deliver a fix. Having suffered months of morning sickness while carrying the twins, she was an expert on puking and was convinced I could be cured with the right breakfast. The specifics of the meal she cooked for me have long left my memory, but it worked. No doubt it was just a placebo effect, but I didn’t care. I got through a flight without seeing that breakfast again. And then another. And another. My self-confidence roared back. My flying career was saved by Donna. From Mt. Home I was directed to Saigon, Republic of Vietnam. I would be flying with the 16th Tactical Reconnaissance Squadron from Tan Son Nhut Air Base.

To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism
by Evgeny Morozov
Published 15 Nov 2013

Of course, some self-trackers are aware that their conclusions may not be, well, scientifically valid; as one such enthusiast told the Economist, “With self-tracking you never really know whether it is your experiment that is affecting the outcome, or your expectations of the experiment.” In science, this is widely known as the placebo effect, and in academic experiments every effort is made to minimize its influence. With the Quantified Self, however, what matters is not knowledge per se but, rather, the utility of various knowledge claims in helping improve one’s health or sex life. Most curiously, one doesn’t need to know how such knowledge will be used; much of it is generated and stored preemptively.

Exercised: The Science of Physical Activity, Rest and Health
by Daniel Lieberman
Published 2 Sep 2020

According to one observational study of more than thirty thousand people, American adults who took sleeping pills on a regular basis increased their risk of dying over the subsequent two and a half years by almost fivefold.67 Many other studies also report strong associations between sleeping pills and depression, cancer, respiratory problems, confusion, sleepwalking, and other dangers.68 And if these cautions were not damning enough, several studies report that most of the benefits of sleeping pills are placebo effects. Insomniacs and healthy controls prescribed popular sleep medications (for example, Sonata and Lunesta) slept on average the same number of hours (about six hours and twenty minutes) as those prescribed a placebo, and they fell asleep only fourteen minutes faster, despite sometimes also reporting memory lapses the next day.69 To quote Jerome Siegel, “In twenty years, people will look back on the sleeping-pill era as we now look back on the acceptance of cigarette smoking.”70 Exercised About Sleep Let’s conclude by returning to the question I posed at the beginning of this chapter: If humans evolved to rest as much as possible, why do so many of us skimp on sleep?

Antifragile: Things That Gain From Disorder
by Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Published 27 Nov 2012

Still, the CDC shows that life expectancy at age 20 only increased from 42.79 (additional years) in 1900–1902 to 51.2 in 1949–1951 and to 58.2 in 2002. 2 A technical comment: in the so-called Bayesian (or conditional probability) analysis, it would be equivalent to looking at A conditional on B rather than B conditional on A. 3 One example of lack of empirical wisdom in the use of “evidence”: in a New York Times Magazine article, a doctor who claimed that he stopped eating sugar because of its potential harm was apologetic for doing so “without full evidence.” The best test of empirical wisdom in someone is in where he puts the burden of evidence. 4 I am trying to avoid discussing the placebo effect; I am in the business of nonlinearities and it does not relate to the nonlinearities argument. 5 Some people claim that we need more fat than carbohydrates; others offer the opposite (they all tend to agree on protein, though few realize we need to randomize protein intake). Both sides still advocate nonrandomness in the mixing and ignore the nonlinearities from sequence and composition. 6 The principal disease of abundance can be seen in habituation and jadedness (what biologists currently call dulling of receptors); Seneca: “To a sick person, honey tastes better.”

Money and Government: The Past and Future of Economics
by Robert Skidelsky
Published 13 Nov 2018

When the Bank acts, its actions give clues to what it will do in the future, and these clues are signals; ‘forward-guidance’ is an explicit commitment to act in a certain way under specified conditions. In its most explicit form, the forward-guidance channel works through policymakers making long-term commitments to keep interest rates exceptionally low. The policy boasts a placebo effect – self-fulfilling prophecies producing a recovery without undertaking the significant risks of expanding the central bank’s balance sheet. Hence, the commitment to continue the low bank rate and asset purchases for a definite length of time was considered crucial to achieving the hoped-for effect of the policy, i.e. raising the inflation rate.

Blueprint: The Evolutionary Origins of a Good Society
by Nicholas A. Christakis
Published 26 Mar 2019

Plus, for female patients with sickle-cell disease, pregnancy used to be so dangerous to the mother and fetus that doctors would recommend birth control if patients made it to sexual maturity, hence obviating reproduction. 80. D. G. Finniss, T. J. Kaptchuk, F. Miller, and F. Benedetti, “Biological, Clinical, and Ethical Advances of Placebo Effects,” Lancet 375 (2010): 686–695. 81. There is some evidence that, in a modern British population, intelligence and educational achievement are being selected against (i.e., such populations have lower fecundity). J. S. Sanjak, J. Sidorenko, M. R. Robinson, K. R. Thornton, and P. M. Visscher, “Evidence of Directional and Stabilizing Selection in Contemporary Humans,” PNAS: Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 115 (2017): 151–156. 82.

The Pot Book: A Complete Guide to Cannabis
by Julie Holland
Published 22 Sep 2010

As a result, benefits were predictably likely to be lower than one would expect to see in patients who were less severely disabled. Also, the inclusion of such patients in clinical trials like these generated great expectations in what the new drug might do. These expectations could cause an exaggerated response (the so-called placebo effect). The classical style of a double-blind, randomized, placebo-controlled trial is notoriously difficult to undertake in patients with chronic pain, unlike with other diseases such as diabetes or high blood pressure, and there are many fewer studies. Results are now emerging from a number of studies demonstrating the effectiveness of Sativex in neuropathic pain, rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer-related pain (Rog et al. 2005; Blake et al. 2006).

Good Calories, Bad Calories: Challenging the Conventional Wisdom on Diet, Weight Control, and Disease
by Gary Taubes
Published 25 Sep 2007

Grafe believed that the fattening effect of insulin is likely “due to improved combustion of carbohydrate and increased synthesis of glycogen and fat.” In the United States, however, the conventional wisdom came from Louis Newburgh and his colleagues at the University of Michigan. When insulin increases weight, Newburgh said, it does so either through the power of suggestion—a placebo effect—or by a reduction of blood sugar to the point where the patient eats to avoid very low blood sugar (hypoglycemia) and the accompanying symptoms of dizziness, weakness, and convulsions. When Rony reviewed the experimental and clinical reports in 1940, he considered any conclusion to be premature.

How to Survive a Plague: The Inside Story of How Citizens and Science Tamed AIDS
by David France
Published 29 Nov 2016

Even dextran sulfate, the drug Staley had advocated during his Crossfire appearance on CNN, was a bust. After the massive FDA demonstration, chastised researchers finally took that drug into the lab only to discover that it made a hasty trip through the urinary tract without ever being properly absorbed. It was the placebo effect that made Staley feel better on dextran sulfate. Through all of this, Kramer had stayed out of the limelight. He was at work on another play, an autobiographical prequel to The Normal Heart. News of its focus on Kramer family foibles irked his brother and sister-in-law, and presaged a sharp estrangement.

Rationality: From AI to Zombies
by Eliezer Yudkowsky
Published 11 Mar 2015

So although she does not receive any benefit of believing in God—because she doesn’t—she honestly believes she has deceived herself into believing in God, and so she honestly expects to receive the benefits that she associates with deceiving oneself into believing in God; and that, I suppose, ought to produce much the same placebo effect as actually believing in God. And this may explain why she was motivated to earnestly defend the statement that she believed in God from my skeptical questioning, while never saying “Oh, and by the way, God actually does exist” or even seeming the slightest bit interested in the proposition.