Episode 9: The placebo effect

If you give someone a sugar pill but convince them it’s a real medicine, they might get better because of the power of belief. That’s the standard story, anyway.

But as Tom and Stuart find in this episode, the more you dig into the science on placebo effects, the more you begin to doubt that the placebo effect is some innate bodily healing process that responds to beliefs. Instead, it might all just be due to mistakes and biases in the studies. Do we need to completely change the way we think about placebos?

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Show notes

* “The Powerful Placebo” - the paper from 1955 that made the placebo effect famous

* The 1965 study on placebo effects when participants know they’re getting a sugar pill

* Bad Science column from 2008 on the power of the placebo effect, “the coolest strangest thing in medicine”

* Review from 2017 on “open-label placebo” studies

* 2018 review on mechanisms of how “placebos without deception” might work

* Slate Star Codex article the 5-HTTLPR gene

* New England Journal of Medicine review of the placebo effect from 2020

* Response to the NEJM review by Dahly and Rafi

* 2010 Cochrane review of “Placebo effects for all clinical conditions”

* “The pervasive problem of placebos in psychology”

* Review & meta-analysis of the placebo effect in studies on back pain

Credits

The Studies Show is produced by Julian Mayers at Yada Yada Productions.