placebo

The effect where thinking about dates coinciding with the fasting month of Ramadan like Tuesday, April 2nd 1991 or Tuesday, April 2nd 2024 can cause you to experience hunger

The placebo effect of thinking about significant dates coinciding with the fasting month of Ramadan, like Tuesday, April 2nd, 1991, can make you feel hungrier than you actually are, proving that sometimes your mind can trick your body!

by Emotional Cruiser November 22, 2025

Placebo-Sneeze

When you're very sure you're going to sneeze but instead; you don't, leaving one either very pleased or very sad.
I for one love a good sneeze therefore, I am sad.

"Oh jeez, i thought i was going to sneeze but i didn't, damn PLACEBO-SNEEZE"

by ITalkToTrees November 28, 2025

Placebo

When it’s something that you think it’s true but it’s not actually true

He said that to me but I think that’s not what he actually said that’s placebo

by Real1324 February 16, 2024

Ship-Placebo

The feeling you have, when you change your ship icon and feel a difference in gameplay, even if there isn't.

"Dude I just beat an extreme after changing my ship"
"Ship-Placebo"

by yesyesir14 March 2, 2024

Hard Problem of the Placebo Effect

Specifically, the challenge of harnessing, studying, or prescribing it without deception and thus destroying it. The effect depends on a belief in a genuine treatment. If a doctor knowingly prescribes a sugar pill saying "this is a powerful drug," it's unethical lying. If they say "this is a placebo, but it might help through your mind," the belief—and thus the effect—often vanishes. The phenomenon seems to require a kind of benevolent, therapeutic illusion that modern medical ethics cannot accommodate. Its very nature resists ethical integration into standard care.

Example: Open-label placebo studies, where patients are told "this is a sugar pill with no medicine, but placebo effects are powerful," still show significant therapeutic benefits for conditions like IBS and chronic pain. This adds another layer to the hard problem: How can belief persist and be efficacious even when the patient knows it's a placebo? This suggests a complex, non-conscious mechanism beyond simple conscious faith, operating even when higher cognition is "in on the trick." Hard Problem of the Placebo Effect.

by Dumuabzu January 25, 2026

Hard Problem of Placebo

The deep philosophical and scientific puzzle of how an inert substance or sham procedure can produce objectively measurable physiological changes (like altered brain chemistry, reduced inflammation, or lowered blood pressure) purely through the patient's subjective belief and expectation. The mystery isn't that people feel better; it's that their bodies actually get better in quantifiable ways without any pharmacologically active cause. This forces a confrontation with the mind-body problem, suggesting that beliefs aren't just mental ghosts but powerful biological agents that can modulate the immune, endocrine, and nervous systems in ways we don't understand.

Example: In a clinical trial, patients given fake painkillers (sugar pills) not only report less pain, but brain scans show their opioid receptors activate and their anterior cingulate cortex (pain-processing region) quiets down, mirroring the exact neural effects of real morphine. The hard problem: How does the abstract meaning of "I have taken medicine" get translated by the brain into the specific biochemical cascade that dampens inflammation? The belief seems to act as its own pharmacology, and we have no map for how that translation works. Hard Problem of Placebo.

by Dumuabzu January 25, 2026