If a doctor gives you a placebo, you only get the placebo effect. If a doctor gives you medicine, you get the placebo effect plus whatever extra benefit the medicine provides.
We already are leveraging the placebo effect, unfortunately we are also doing it in a negative way by highlighting side effects.
> the placebo effect plus whatever extra benefit the medicine provides.
Plus, the act of noticing those extra effects can give you another placebo effect on top, e.g. if the medicine has some noticeable effect, the placebo can get stronger, or cause other effects to accompany it.
Of course there is also consciously learning to leverage the effects of the medicine, which is a non-placebo~
Close. If a doctor gives you a placebo, you can only get the placebo. No guarantee you will get anything, of course. You could also get the negative side effects of the real medicine, without any cure.
For some medications those side effects can be severe though - I think there's some rationale in actually purposefully leveraging the placebo effect without giving the patient a medication that could harm them.
Well, to be honest - that's kind of a uniquely American problem. Lots of places in the world don't have free pharmacare but only in America is the cost going to be so incredibly significant that the profit motive is strong enough to encourage charlantry.
I mean, this might have been the case when standards of medical practice were so bad that the homeopathic hospital was one of the safest places to be because whilst the medical care there was purely placebo, that was better than a doctor with unwashed hands attempting crude surgery.
But modern treatments are evaluated based on having demonstrable net positive effects above and beyond placebo.
We already are leveraging the placebo effect, unfortunately we are also doing it in a negative way by highlighting side effects.