The Placebo Effect: Brain Over Pain

your on your desk. I've I've scaled down in recent years, but but I still take a few things here and there, and and I tend to stick to the things I take because I feel like they're helping in some way shape or form, like either it you know, relaxes me when you know, when I'm needing a relaxation, or gives me a little a bit of increased concentration or or or energy or what have you. Whatever the the the

desired result happens to be. But in the back of my mind there's always the idea of the Polcebo effect, and I'm always find myself thinking, now is this working or is this or am I just paying you know whatever for for you know, a fake little pill and

it's and it's all in my mind. And then if it is all in my mind, should I stop or should I keep going to get that pulacebo effect, because at what point can you can you still get I mean, if you explain away the placebo, then you can't fool your brain, can't fool you into getting that effect, right, Yeah, I know, I know, And sometimes I may have had the same thoughts before because I use essential oil sometimes mainly because they smell nice, but of course they're supposed

to be mood lifting or what is essential about essential oils? Well, I mean they're the distilled um oil of whatever that thing is, so um, you know, sort of like gelfling um oil or whatever from the dark crystal when they would, yes, sort of, except for it's more like lavender, okay, So it's like a lavender parent condensed oil. And in great Fruit that's a nice one too, and it it does have like a sort of nice uplifting center. But I have thought before, you know, am I just is this

sort of quackery. But at the end of the day, I don't really care because it smells good, right, and like if that's if it's just all bs. But it just but you know, the the underlying thing here is that my house is going to smell nice? What harm is it doing? Right? Yeah? So I mean that's the whole thing about placebo, right, is we know a little bit about it. Right. It makes us feel better in a medical sense. You know you were talking about in

aert pill that someone might take. Um, it's actually measurable, observable felt improvement in your health and in your behavior and um. And it has pretty wide reaching ramifications, as we're going to discuss in this in this podcast episode. Like it goes beyond just you know, me shopping for vitamins. Are you you know, getting the oil of a tree?

So yeah, it turns out the placebo effect is driving big pharmaceutical companies crazy and like never before and that and the reason for that is because the placebo effects seems to be increasing in their clinical trials with new drugs. So they're sitting there saying what was going on here? Like we used to be able to pass you know, nineteen out of fifty drugs through clinical trials, but now and this is this is super crazy. Half half of the medicines that are coming out of clinical trials are

being discounted because of the placebo effect. Basically, when you go to these clinical trials, the medication has to go

up against the placebo and tests exactly. It's I mean, it sounds really straightforward that, Hey, for this medication to to work, it needs to work better than fake medication because you have control groups in these you'll have white Group A. Well, let's say you have a new a new drug that contains I don't know, um, I don't pecans in it or something I don't know that was just I don't imagine some imaginary drug that comes from some plant in South America or something that it's yeah,

something that is expensive to obtain, something that's costly, something that they may A lot of research has gone into a lot of scientists have been hunched over labs, and lots of money has gone into developing this pill. So you've got that, and you give that to Group A to treat their I don't know, their hypertension, and then a group B gets this placebo, which is nothing. It's it's made, it's a it's just a pill. It's like basically like a sugar pill, and and it has no

actual there's nothing inside that pill. That can actually help them, but they're giving it, and both groups think they're they're getting the price research possible new super drug to treat their hypertension. So you and again it sounds just overly simple, but you want group A who's taking the real drug to have better results than the group taking the sugar pill. But it's not always the case, and unless you discuss it's often a surprising amount of time it is not

the case. And in fact, within a depressants in particular, they're finding astounding results, which is that seventy of the drugs that are using anidepressants are found to be effective, but also seventy five of the placebos are also giving people relief. So that all of a sudden that that puts the whole question about medication into a new light and the approach to actually even testing them or even

assessing depression and other disorders. Um, it's actually really blown open the whole placebo effect in general and made Big Farm look at placebo in a new way because before it was sort of like we just have to get over the placebo effect. It's a problem. Yeah, and and there's this great Wired article it's called placebos are getting

more effective. Drug makers are desperate to know why, and they actually call out the fact that that this may be an opportunity to actually look at the amazing ability of the body to heal its health. Yeah. This is the article by Wired Steve Silberman, Yeah, be Silberman, Yeah, yeah, So, I mean it's it's pretty fascinating to look at the issue. And um, I wanted just to give a little quick

history of placebo though. Oh yeah, now we're only going we're going by Sieber's paper and going back to World War two, right, Yeah, World War two basically you have you know, in Italy, there's um, there's an enthusiologist I believe, Yeah, by the name of Henry Beecher, yea Henry Beecher. He's

attending to U. S. Troops under heavy German bombardment. And uh, when you're treating catastrophic injuries, you need to have morphine on hand, right, So they're pumping full Yeah, they're pumping morphine into these guys to to deaden the pain while they work on him. And uh, they run out of morphine. Yeah, And a nurse, very savvy nurse that was working with Henry Beecher basically pretended that she with a wounded soldier was giving him an injection of morphine and said, I'm

giving you a really potent pain killer. Don't worry, You'll be fine. It was in fact only saltwater. Um. But what Beacher observed is that the wounded soldier did not go into shock when he had his procedure done, and

that the wounded soldiers seemed to feel relief. So he saw firsthand the effects of the placebo effect, and later on when he went back to Harvard after the war, he began to look at it more seriously, um, and was now investigating the placebo effect against current day medications of that time to see if they were really effective.

It was an incredible new idea. Actually. Yeah, in the you put out a paper called the Powerful Placebo, publishing the Journal of American Medical Association, and uh, it undermined the results of more than a dozen trials by causing improvement that was mistakenly uh, you know, attributed to whatever the medicinal properties were. Yeah, yeah, so it was This was a a huge moment in modern drugs because because suddenly, here's the placebo messing up everything that you're you're trying

to do, becoming this hurdle. And like you said, that's kind of the history of it. It It becomes this hurdle when uh, when perhaps they you know that you could argue they should be looking at it and saying, well, why why is the placebo working as opposed to why why are drugs not working better than the pacebo? Yeah, and with Beecher, I mean, he was just trying to keep quackery at bay, right, and he was basically just

trying to apply this um. He wasn't necessarily thinking that this was going to be taken up by big farmer, nor could he have ever predicted how big this industry would become. And as you say, it would become this obstacle for them to to, you know, get over um. So there you go. That's the history of it, and that's why we have it and we know that it's effective.

But that being said, it's been a long time since we've revisited the placebo effect, and particularly in the light of antidepressants and stuff and what's talk about a little bit about that later, and it still remains a fairly unknown quantity. I mean, it's scientists continue to try and understand it. But the will seebo effect is is in many ways still a mystery. Yeah, and we do know

a little bit more. But I mean the question is, what in the world is really going on in your body when it starts to actually heal itself and give you albeit temporary really right, placebo effect has its limits. It's not going to cure tumor. But um, if you've say, like you have Parkinson's or um sexual dysfunction or um sorry for you, and you have maybe depression or something along those lines, we know that those sort of disorders

really respond well to placebo effect. So um. And actually it was once thought that placebo effect was a result of our own level of gullibility or even like a psychological trait that was related to neurosis, weakness of character, kind of thing. Give him anything, they'll they'll give him

a sugar pill. They'll think they're they're healed. But but it seems more than that now obviously, I mean, we can't go so far as to, you know, scientifically say what it's mind over matter, it's it's anything you believe becomes real, because I don't either that's not the case, or no belief is really strong enough to to to alter physical reality. But but but something's happening, but we see the belief system working in tandem with the body.

So uh entered Dr Fabrizio Benedetti, UM, and he actually calls a placebo effect the placebo response because of its self healing, and he calls it endogenous health care system. After fifteen years of research, Benedetti has mapped a biochemical reactions of the placebo effect and he's found that Uh. And this is again from the Wired article quote, placebo activated opioids not only relieve pain, they also modulate heart rate and respiration. The neurotransmitter dopamine, when released by the

placebo treatment, helps improve motor function in Parkinson's patients. Uh. So it's mechanisms like this that can elevate mood, sharpen cognitive ability, alleviate jutive disorders IBS is another one. But responsibile to this, by the way, relieve insomnia and limit the secretion of stress related hormones like insulin in the cortisol.

So he's seeing this in action. UM. And again we're talking about the placebo effect working in tandem with the mind, and what this is bearing out is that the mind is trying to anticipate the future, right it's just it's saying, Okay, I'm going to take this pill. I've got this condition, and you know I already know that. Um, I already knew what to expect in terms of relief and even side effects, right, And so the mind is actually queuing itself up for this and releasing those opioids, which is

amazing um. And actually one of the biggest self healing triggers is to witness someone else experiencing the benefits of a drug. So again, you you have this sort of conditioning response. Well, you're you're engaging in this kind of so the social activity of of the the doctor administering something that that heals you. Yeah. Absolutely. In fact, there was a researcher ted Capouch, and he recruited volunteer suffering from IBS irritable Boll syndrome, and they were put into

three groups. One group just made uh an appointment for treatment and they found some relief just by the act of signing up for for treatment. The other group were given a placebo from a medical professional who did not engage with them at all. And then the third group were given the placebo, but the clinician actually engaged with that group quite a bit, talked to them about their suffering, talked about them, um, you know how they felt about it,

and gave them some positive feedback. So again here we go. Like you mentioned, there's there's the social aspect to it. That group responded the best out of all three. So the bed the beds I manner of the physician is really important. Yeah, absolutely. Um. Steve Silverman also points out that the color of the pill even makes it different. This is this is like yellow pills make make the

bet the most effective antidepressants. Red pills give you a kick, you know because it's red, like the blood of a bull or something. Right. Adrenaline. Yeah, green reduces anxiety, you know. Green is kind of calming. Um and uh and and and they say that even like branding, you know, becomes involved in it, like it's all in the packaging and

the delivery. And I mean the color thing just makes me think, you know, it's just some like a sufficiently sufficiently believable physician could just walk into a sick ward with like a bag of starbursts and just start healing

people left and right. Yeah, if you have the association that starbursts, we're going to make everything about like you know, if maybe Star Wars had spent one hundred million dollars on the campaign trying to link some sort of benefit between the consumption of the chewy stuff stuck in your teeth and your health. Um. One of the other things too that was interesting is that it's cultural. These perceptions

are cultural. Oh yeah, like they're the Germans, right, well, not only the Germans, but the Italians because you're talking about the blue pills and the red pills and so of course the blue pills was to be soothing, right and the red pill again it's more of an aggressive thing. But in Italy the color of the national soccer team is blue, so that's perceived as aggressive. And yeah, so it comes down, you know, to that level. It's really interesting.

That is fascinating, Like I wonder how that affects like even like international branding, you know, oh yeah, you know if you have you have branding for for something that's that you want the consumer to to think of it and relax terms or soothing terms, and then in Italy you have the angry blue and the you know, the

victorious soccer team and get them all riled up. Yeah yeah, and you have to wonder how that extends like throughout their society, like you know, if they've if their apartments are all in blue, if that's not like, wow, that's like a really aggressive bachelor. But the Germans in particular. Anthro anthropologist Daniel Mormon um to the study and he found that Germans are high placebo reactors and trials of ulcer drugs, but low in trials of drugs for hypertension.

Um because hypertension is an undertreated condition in Germany. So um. So again, it's about engaging in this in this uh, this social maze that comes with the treatment of an of an illness, being being aware of its treatment, seeing um success stories either in your life or in the media, like a lot of it. Like you know, when you think of like anxiety or depression medications, instantly we think of those commercials where or I guess it's also even

for things like her pies and stuff. But it's like you know, some smiling person walking through a field and they're happy and they're they're running and birds are singing and it is just driving home. Take this and be happy and you will be able to go outdoors and frolic. That's usually the message. Oh and you'll you know, you'll

be surrounded by a bunch of people who love you. Yeah, it's kind of the same as a Mentos commercial, except they have to add a lot of legal text at the end, like Mentos doesn't have to have that that half a strain of fight. Yeah, there's there's no talk of diarrhea and the Mentos commercial thanksfully. Um. But the German example that is really interesting that that makes me think, is it um again, is it sort of like this uh anticipation like they because it is underreported, Um, what

was the hypertension is under reported? It's not as big of a deal maybe, and they're not as conditioned to to think as much of it as that perhaps, I think so, Yeah, like it's undertreated, like it's just not on people's minds as much, where whereas you know, something

like like depression is very much on everybody's minds. Everybody, Like we just have this this uh almost like this cult of the quest for happiness that has been pressed upon us through uh mass media and through you know, everybody knows somebody who takes the takes something to improve their their daily life, whether it's uh, you know, prescote medication or just some sort of weird you know, herbal thing that they buy from the health food store. Yeah,

that's true. And just just to put that in perspective with the statistic, let me see, in nine six there were thirteen million antidepressants doled out and that has since doubled to twenty six million by two thousand and seven. Yeah, So, I mean, and you know, we all know that that's something that everyone is apt to grapple with at some point. We have plenty of statistics that tell us that, you know, each of us is going to at some point feel

maybe a cute depression. So it's not surprising that it's on our minds. Um. But again, you know, good getting back to the placebo effect and why it may be getting stronger, and going back to the commercials that you were talking about. That actually seems to be one of the culprits of why the placebo effect, why people in clinical trials are feeling this conditioning to to get better or actually self healing. Um. They think that the marketing has just been so great and so rampant that it's

really conditioning people to already get in that mindset. We already have studies that say that when people make an appointment to even do this, they feel better. So that's that's one area of it. Uh. And then another aspect is that the way that they're classifying an illness or

disorder this is sort of interesting. And talking about depression in particular, there's something called the Hamilton's Depression Rating Scale, and that was created fifty years ago and it's based on a study of major depressive disorder and patients in an asylum. Okay, so you can already tell that there are problems with this scale anyway, because fifty years ago, when we had a different idea of what depression was

in an asylum a small sample group. Um, So there are people today they are saying, maybe we shouldn't take this scale and use it particularly for disorders that have to do with depression, and revisit this and and maybe we'll get a better idea of what the placebo effect is doing if we can redefine what depression is an interesting way of looking at it. Um. Now, there are a couple of other related This presentation is brought to you by Intel Sponsors of tomorrow topic sample Sebo that

that are pretty fascinating. One that I ran across and imagine you did as well, it's the honest placebo, and I just that, well, this is kind of like what I was talking earlier. If I, you know, if I I have to say, you know, I have some sort of herbal thing back from the health, you know, and I don't know for certain that it's working, but I don't know that it's not working. But if I knew for a fact that it was just a sugar pill, would it still work on me? Well, this is called

an honest placebo? Uh, this is a doctor's uh involved in this think that the placebos work because patients think they might be getting an active drug. But there's a no element of deception or I mean that's the the old version, you know. It's like there's the deception at work that I think this is gonna work. So it does,

even it's a sugar pill. Right. But in two thousands, ten Harvard researchers found that even when volunteers with severe bowel disease know they're getting a placebo, had relief in the symptoms um which which is is is pretty amazing. Yeah. I know. Again, it's that whole idea of like, why aren't we studying what's going on with the body when it's trying to self heal. And then it brings up the question of do we must must we always have deception? Yeah?

You know, is there is there any way too to have the placebo response without some sort of you know curtain, you know, behind our understanding of what's going on? Well, it seems like one way that it might. It's like, even in listening to this podcast, or even in researching this podcast, we get this idea that, oh, there's I mean, I hate to mystify it at all, but you kind of get this mystic idea of what is a placebo doing? Maybe you know, what is my mind doing when I

take up placebo? And then it becomes this possible that you get this possible expectation in your mind that even if you take something that doesn't work, that it might work, you know, like like that becomes the new placebo, the new fiction for the placebo to work. Then. But see, that's why I think it's so fascinating, because I think that, you know, in an evolutionary sense, have we always had to construct some sort of fiction in order to pull through? Do you know what I'm saying is this is it

something that's comes out of evolution. Well, interestingly you should ask that because there is a guy in the name of Matt Rossano who's professor of psychology at Southeastern Louisiana University, and he wrote a book called Supernatural Selection, How Religion Evolved, And this is basically his argument. All right, Um, First, he says that our ancestors developed complex social structures to

cope with a harsh, unforgiving world. You know, it's there, giant mammals everywhere eating everything I have worked really hard discrete, buy, and then I'm going to die when I'm really young, probably eaten by a large mammal. Uh. It's it's a rough world. So you know, you end up with this, This social structure emerges, um and uh. And you end up with the hierarchy in the group and uh. And there's some probably some sense of peace or some structure

that makes you feel better about the world. Right, But you end up with this social structure. And so you're gonna need uh. People with with more memory are gonna be able to better navigate it. You're gonna need a knack for symbolic thought to to move through it. So nature begins selecting for imaginative children. The imaginative children are by natural selection of the ones that end up surviving, because they have better they're better suited to navigate these

complex social relationships as adults. And since the more imaginative children are the ones that survive, they end up bringing this imagination into their adulthood and this birth's gods and spirits. So Rossano states that early religion was was shamanistic. You know, it's like you know, guys saying, oh, you got a headache here, stuck on this frog, your bellies of you know,

bothering you. Well, draw this on your stomach and set on the stone, you know, things of that nature thrown in with some you know, not to say that all ancient or traditional medicines are phony there, so there's some indicial plants that we know that are used, but still humans, uh that. He argues that that basically they had a

health care system of ritual healing practices. You know, some which may have worked and some that didn't, but there was no real way to tell in those days, right, But humans who participated in healing rituals were healthier thanks to the placebo effect, and more likely to procreate. Keeping the religions evolutionary march in motion. See that's interesting because I read too that the placebo Again, it's highly effective for disorders that engage the higher cortical centers, that generate

beliefs and expectations. They interpret social cues and anticipate awards. And again this is chronic pain, sexual dysfunction, Parkinson's and depression for example, that really responds well to this. But okay, but what if I'm kind of a hoypochondriac. What if I what if I am kind of a worrior? What happens? Then? I don't know. I guess you kind of get, maybe you just get what if I read the placebo effect right? But but what if what if I just can't help

it focus on those list of side effects? Then you're going to fall Praise is something called the new cebo effect. Yeah, and it's the which we're not making up. That's not even that's like that's actual Latin. Yes, yeah, what was Latin for? Again? Um? If I remember correctly, it's like um to harm? Yeah, yeah, and placebo is Latin for to please, I believe, Yeah, but no cebo effect is basically like the dark side of cebo effects. So think

of it. If you are anticipating getting better and getting relief, but you're told that the drug that you are given is going to have side effects and you're going to vomit and you may have a rectile dysfunction. Guess what you're going to be doing vomiting and having erected out as such? Yes, exactly. Um, So that that's difficult, right, And that's particularly difficult in terms of I guess you could even say ethics if you're dealing with someone who

is seriously sick. Um. And I don't know if they do this with cancer treatments. I imagine that they probably do, because I need to test it. Right, To test it, you need a control group. Yeah, you need a control group. And if you're in that control group and you're getting the placebo and you're awfully sick already and then on top of that you're getting other side effects, that that's where some doctors are saying, Okay, that's that's not very cool.

I mean, we do need to have the control group, and we do need to study this, but you know, it is obviously the dark side of the sebo effect. There were some doctors that, like early on, they thought that that the uh that this was caused because people were worrying as they're taking the medicine and so their stomach releasing enough acids to cause pain. But but but they but they They found that the range of possible um no cebo responses stretched far beyond near stomach gigs.

And what's more, they found that the these no cebo effects weren't random. They tend to be specific to the type of drug that patients believe they're taking. Oh yeah, yeah, absolutely, it's lining up with a group. I mean with a list of possible side effects. Yeah. I mean imagine watching that commercial. I mean we all know them, right, and it seems like that endless list that goes on forever, never blurred vision. Yeah, wacky thoughts. Um, you know you

are going to take all of that information. Your brain is gonna absorb it and just like your body can heal on it, and with cebo effect, it's going to say, Okay, guys, buckle ups can be a rough ride. Wacky thoughts ahead. Um. So yeah, I mean it's it's kind of nuts to think of it that way. Um. But I also wanted to talk a little bit too. I mean, we've we've talked about the cebo effect and how cool this is

and and obviously it bears so much more studying. But this, you know, I just need to caution that this is not a reason to actually quit your meds. You know. Um, this is not anything that we're advocating. It's just an interesting paradigm shift on medication and on the placebo effect and looking at that a little bit closer. Um. So I just wanted to add that because obviously if you were to, especially with antipressence, if you were to get

off of them, you'd have horrible withdrawal symptoms. Also, each person is unique to their medication and to their conditions. So h there you go again. Yeah, don't stop your your medications, don't don't don't make any medical decisions based on what you hear in this podcast. Yeah. Absolutely, Um, you should always consult with your doctor, speaking of whom. Um. You know, perhaps this isn't the best place to throw this information out, but I did want to mention that

how widespread placebo effect is. And this is from one study, and albeit's one study. It's in Chicago from two thousand and seven. They were doctors that were surveyed there and they were asked about whether or not they had ever prescribed the placebo effect, or rather, I should say, had they ever prescribed something that they knew wasn't necessarily going to work for their patients or it was at such a low level dosage that it wouldn't do anything in

order to induce the placebo effect. Half of those doctors had done that. Now they didn't actually write pallacebo on the Yeah, fake pills, I think is what they wrote. My mother in law frequently uses the placebo effect on uh, my brother in law's kids. They'll complain there because you know, they're kids, they're always complaining of something. And she'll get like like gummy vitamins and so it's like, oh you oh,

you've got a stomach ach, oh your your head. Here, take one of these and it works like a charm. They just gummy vitamins. That's uh. We'll have to put them in back pocket for my two year old. They'll be very warm if you keep them in your back pocket though. Yeah, but yeah, that's nice. Yeah, the kids like a good warm com Okay, maybe not um, but you know, here we go. I mean, that's that's This is just an interesting time to to look at this information.

Oh and I wanted to also man into that drug companies are paying, as I said, huge attention to this right now. And typically they have been really um covert about their operations and they haven't let a lot of their data out of the bag, so to speak. But they actually are pulling together and trying to get a study of the placebo effect and pulling their research all the drug companies, which is pretty interesting. And I believe

the ni H is also heading this up. So it'd be interesting to see in the next couple of years what sort of data they get out of this. And also that I mean, we're talking about a lot of money, all the money. And they also know that that some of their their big marquee sellers like Prozac may not actually cut the muster these days if they were too, because they actually, uh retrial some of these just for for fun, and noticed that the protact is actually not

as effective as it was once deemed. And again this could be because the placebo effect is becoming more rampant trials. But there you go. Don't get off the protect though, Yeah, stay on it. If here on it again, check with your doctor. Absolutely. Well, Hey, we have some interesting feedback

here from some from some listeners. Our first bit of mail comes from Ola delhi Um one of our listeners, Oladelli rides Hi, listen to your podcast where you talk about the robot singularity and how this creepy one and this creepy one about cyber immortality. So it gets one thinking what if my memories representing past actions and experiences and and Myers Briggs Briggs profiles used to generate new actions and experiences were mapped to a robots century inactions system.

Sure surely very deep and all that information and blueprint for future actions. The robot could act independently. I reckon it could sort of understand and hints, work towards my goals and play out a version of me which would be based on me, but different from me, independently of me. Could it then comp compete with me for my friends attention or be jealous of me if I got to know, if it got to know me, or would I be jealous of it? Would that be considered the singularity of

some sort? I don't know, it's interesting. I mean you know that there there's been an intranet created for robots, right, and if you splice the singularity. With that, then you could very well have your robot self hacking your Facebook account and taking you over. You're right well in your cyber presence, suddenly liking things you don't like, like going

up in its own Yeah, yeah, kind of trolling you. Um, I mean, I kind of just but I mean just to extend out that logic, kind of interesting about what how all those parts might work together. Yeah, some good

good brain fadder there. And uh, speaking of the cyber Immortality podcast, we received a lot of cool comments from folks who really dug that and uh uh, you know, we can't read them all, but I have a bit here from a listener by the name of Crystal, and Crystal relates that she had lost a friend and uh

and then goes on to add uh. Since that point, I have not been able to check my voicemails because my inbox is literally full of messages from this individual, built up about a week while my phone was out of minutes. This has really been bothering me lately. And then I listened to the cyber Immortality podcast. It gave me a whole new perspective on the digital bit of information I have of this individual. I am happy to

report my inbox is now empty. Well, I saved a few of them and I have you guys to thank for it. Thanks a lot. But by the way, don't oh wait than she had something else. But if anyway, that's the key bit that I thought was was really interesting, that stuff that you know, obviously a lot of people are are having to take the digital realm into account and dealing with with the deaths of friends and loved one these days, and uh, um, it was it was it really interesting to hear some tidbits from a few

different listeners about this. Yeah, we did. We had some some really nice email about that, and people who had UM like Crystal talked about ways that they were revisiting actually people they had lost online. So it's very interesting stuff. And uh, if you have any cool feedback to at this um, if you have some interesting stories about your own experiences with placebos, for instance, we would love to

hear about them or your own thoughts on placebos. Or if you're a doctor of any kind or engaged in the medical industry or the pharmaceutical drug industry, Uh, let us know, shoot us, shoot us an email, or uh find us on Facebook or Twitter, or blow the mind on both of those get in and again. If you're a big farmer, you can. You can always rant to us blow the mind at how stuff works dot com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit

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