What actually is placebo? It just doesnt make sense

[castleofargh]

Hello,

i have a very specific question....

"Science" regards placebo as something that isnt real, its the "power of the brain/mind" making things up (there are even clear signs that a placebo can actually alter your blood composition " just by the power of the mind ")

Now tell me, how on earth is science differentiating between these:

-IF- EMF radation actually has an effect on humans, what does "science" expect to happen OTHER than a placebo ? it just doesnt make sense imo
where the mind might be altered by EMF, essentially "firing differently, changing your blood composition because of that" just like an actual placebo

i mean, science probably tested the effect on EMF radiation, but do they expect you fall to the ground or something?

imo its a pretty similar story with crystals, either you learned to listen what your body tells you (essentially noticing what the "placebo" does) or you go by science, its all bull, placebo

Now i imagine "the power of the mind making things up" is just as strong, (if not stronger) than external influences, but does that really mean external influences can have no effect at all? science put all this "oh i can feel it" stuff under an placebo umbrella which just heavly goes against my subjective expierence with things

i mean science still hasnt got the memo that "placebo" actually works for many people....

Your posts and @IanB52's on the thread so far show dishonesty and false logic. The hallmarks of a sincere desire for truth.


If I get the feeling that putting a quantum sticker on my forehead makes me taller, does it make me taller? Is the feeling the same thing as the actual effect? Is the feeling a proof that I'm taller? Thinking that a feeling is a fact, or that an idea is a demonstration, those are logical fallacies leading to jumping to conclusion. We need to overcome those to get a chance at finding out the truth.

Now, how should it be done:
You get a feeling, and some idea as to why it happens. You consider that a hypothesis(all an idea can ever be on its own) and think about how it could be put to the test. Which for the very vast majority of situations consists in trying to disprove the idea and see if we can. With the basic and fundamental principle that if you can disprove it, then the idea was wrong.

1/So let's start with the idea that the quantum sticker makes someone taller. How do we test that?
The solution is to measure people before and after they put on the sticker and find out how that goes.
But not so fast. How consistent is a measurement of height? If the margin of error is too big, it might mask the effect of the sticker. How much can someone change his height just from a postural point of view(voluntary to mess up with the test, or unconscious)?
One option would be to set up a measurement procedure that is harder to cheat and will shows smaller error variations between successive measurements. Like maybe only measuring one bone in the leg?
But what if the stickers generate a growth at the joints? Now, our solution doesn't test for it. It's important to define a clear specific question, stick with it rigorously, list and handle/test all the possibilities within that question. The broader the question, the less likely we'll get a clear, conclusive result. Here we consider the questions testable and repeatable, not everything is.

2/ another relevant question could be to ask what causes the feeling of growth that some testimonies talk about? That question could be studied whether actual growth is happening or not, as we're now questioning the feeling itself.
How would we do that? We could start with making another kind of sticker(same size, ideally same look, or ensure the subject doesn't have a mirror and doesn't touch the sticker throughout the experiment). And now we put the quantum sticker on some people, and the other "just a sticker" that's the placebo test sticker on others. We do that to enough subjects to get a meaningful statistical result, and once the effect is supposed to have happened(just ask the marketing guy selling the stickers) we ask the subjects how they feel(to see if spontaneously some get the impression of being taller or if that idea doesn't occur without priming the concept of sticker making us grow taller). And then we clarify with a second question, specifically about a feeling of growth. "Do you feel taller?"
From the data, we can determine if the quantum sticker seems to make more people feel taller and if they come up with that feeling on their own.

3/But we could also tell the subjects from the start that the test is about a quantum sticker that makes them grow taller(in 2/ they wouldn't know what it is or what it does before the end). What we test has now changed. Now we still go with the real vs false sticker and at the end we gather statistical data to find out if those with the BS sticker had the same tendency of feeling taller. If the stats are pretty much the same for both sticker users, then we can conclude that there is a strong placebo effect. And if we also did experiment 2/, we could directly see how telling people about the effect in 3/, changed how many report a feeling of growth compared to 2/.

With 1/ on top of that, we can also associate actual growth(if there is any to find), with the use of the real sticker, and if maybe more people have grown taller in 3/ than in 2/, that would now suggest that convincing people they will grow taller, makes more of them really grow taller. Imagine that ^_^. You give a placebo to people, and they get taller from the belief that it will happen. That would be a cool discovery.

 

[Ghoostknight]

If I get the feeling that putting a quantum sticker on my forehead makes me taller, does it make me taller? Is the feeling the same thing as the actual effect? Is the feeling a proof that I'm taller? Thinking that a feeling is a fact, or that an idea is a demonstration, those are logical fallacies leading to jumping to conclusion. We need to overcome those to get a chance at finding out the truth.

Now, how should it be done:
You get a feeling, and some idea as to why it happens. You consider that a hypothesis(all an idea can ever be on its own) and think about how it could be put to the test. Which for the very vast majority of situations consists in trying to disprove the idea and see if we can. With the basic and fundamental principle that if you can disprove it, then the idea was wrong.

1/So let's start with the idea that the quantum sticker makes someone taller. How do we test that?
The solution is to measure people before and after they put on the sticker and find out how that goes.
But not so fast. How consistent is a measurement of height? If the margin of error is too big, it might mask the effect of the sticker. How much can someone change his height just from a postural point of view(voluntary to mess up with the test, or unconscious)?
One option would be to set up a measurement procedure that is harder to cheat and will shows smaller error variations between successive measurements. Like maybe only measuring one bone in the leg?
But what if the stickers generate a growth at the joints? Now, our solution doesn't test for it. It's important to define a clear specific question, stick with it rigorously, list and handle/test all the possibilities within that question. The broader the question, the less likely we'll get a clear, conclusive result. Here we consider the questions testable and repeatable, not everything is.

2/ another relevant question could be to ask what causes the feeling of growth that some testimonies talk about? That question could be studied whether actual growth is happening or not, as we're now questioning the feeling itself.
How would we do that? We could start with making another kind of sticker(same size, ideally same look, or ensure the subject doesn't have a mirror and doesn't touch the sticker throughout the experiment). And now we put the quantum sticker on some people, and the other "just a sticker" that's the placebo test sticker on others. We do that to enough subjects to get a meaningful statistical result, and once the effect is supposed to have happened(just ask the marketing guy selling the stickers) we ask the subjects how they feel(to see if spontaneously some get the impression of being taller or if that idea doesn't occur without priming the concept of sticker making us grow taller). And then we clarify with a second question, specifically about a feeling of growth. "Do you feel taller?"
From the data, we can determine if the quantum sticker seems to make more people feel taller and if they come up with that feeling on their own.

3/But we could also tell the subjects from the start that the test is about a quantum sticker that makes them grow taller(in 2/ they wouldn't know what it is or what it does before the end). What we test has now changed. Now we still go with the real vs false sticker and at the end we gather statistical data to find out if those with the BS sticker had the same tendency of feeling taller. If the stats are pretty much the same for both sticker users, then we can conclude that there is a strong placebo effect. And if we also did experiment 2/, we could directly see how telling people about the effect in 3/, changed how many report a feeling of growth compared to 2/.

With 1/ on top of that, we can also associate actual growth(if there is any to find), with the use of the real sticker, and if maybe more people have grown taller in 3/ than in 2/, that would now suggest that convincing people they will grow taller, makes more of them really grow taller. Imagine that ^_^. You give a placebo to people, and they get taller from the belief that it will happen. That would be a cool discovery.

first of all, you are right, testing like you just mention in different topologys give an actual better view on things and i guess something like this is actually applied in science/research, the disconnect for me and why i started the thread happens here:

i will go with the EMF example

1. subjective expierence suggesting there is a difference
2. EEG results showing there is actually something happening in the body
3. even a study directly talking about potential side effects like headaches: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6025786/ (actually science might be on the right track here to the actual truth?)

Technological devices have become essential components of daily life. However, their deleterious effects on the body, particularly on the nervous system, are well known. Electromagnetic fields (EMF) have various chemical effects, including causing deterioration in large molecules in cells and imbalance in ionic equilibrium. Despite being essential for life, oxygen molecules can lead to the generation of hazardous by-products, known as reactive oxygen species (ROS), during biological reactions. These reactive oxygen species can damage cellular components such as proteins, lipids and DNA. Antioxidant defense systems exist in order to keep free radical formation under control and to prevent their harmful effects on the biological system. Free radical formation can take place in various ways, including ultraviolet light, drugs, lipid oxidation, immunological reactions, radiation, stress, smoking, alcohol and biochemical redox reactions. Oxidative stress occurs if the antioxidant defense system is unable to prevent the harmful effects of free radicals. Several studies have reported that exposure to EMF results in oxidative stress in many tissues of the body. Exposure to EMF is known to increase free radical concentrations and traceability and can affect the radical couple recombination. The purpose of this review was to highlight the impact of oxidative stress on antioxidant systems.

4. but people state your subjective expierence is only placebo / bias because you cant actually easily differentiate between a "mind-induced placebo" making you feel like that or an actual effect on the body, that would trigger a "placebo-like" responds where blood chemistry is still measurably altered (just like the study in point 3. suggests)

 

[Ghoostknight]

its not like i dont wanna know the actual truth but the more i read into these kind of topics, the more i feel like "placebo" gets thrown around way to easy and the final connection of dots is just not made because "placebo" is in the way

im pretty sure for example being extremlely anxious might just lead to oxidative stress too ( lets call it "mind-induced placebo" )

i kinda get why these studys end up with no real conclusions then...

 

[IanB52]

Your posts and @IanB52's on the thread so far show dishonesty and false logic. The hallmarks of a sincere desire for truth.


If I get the feeling that putting a quantum sticker on my forehead makes me taller, does it make me taller? Is the feeling the same thing as the actual effect? Is the feeling a proof that I'm taller? Thinking that a feeling is a fact, or that an idea is a demonstration, those are logical fallacies leading to jumping to conclusion. We need to overcome those to get a chance at finding out the truth.

Now, how should it be done:
You get a feeling, and some idea as to why it happens. You consider that a hypothesis(all an idea can ever be on its own) and think about how it could be put to the test. Which for the very vast majority of situations consists in trying to disprove the idea and see if we can. With the basic and fundamental principle that if you can disprove it, then the idea was wrong.

1/So let's start with the idea that the quantum sticker makes someone taller. How do we test that?
The solution is to measure people before and after they put on the sticker and find out how that goes.
But not so fast. How consistent is a measurement of height? If the margin of error is too big, it might mask the effect of the sticker. How much can someone change his height just from a postural point of view(voluntary to mess up with the test, or unconscious)?
One option would be to set up a measurement procedure that is harder to cheat and will shows smaller error variations between successive measurements. Like maybe only measuring one bone in the leg?
But what if the stickers generate a growth at the joints? Now, our solution doesn't test for it. It's important to define a clear specific question, stick with it rigorously, list and handle/test all the possibilities within that question. The broader the question, the less likely we'll get a clear, conclusive result. Here we consider the questions testable and repeatable, not everything is.

2/ another relevant question could be to ask what causes the feeling of growth that some testimonies talk about? That question could be studied whether actual growth is happening or not, as we're now questioning the feeling itself.
How would we do that? We could start with making another kind of sticker(same size, ideally same look, or ensure the subject doesn't have a mirror and doesn't touch the sticker throughout the experiment). And now we put the quantum sticker on some people, and the other "just a sticker" that's the placebo test sticker on others. We do that to enough subjects to get a meaningful statistical result, and once the effect is supposed to have happened(just ask the marketing guy selling the stickers) we ask the subjects how they feel(to see if spontaneously some get the impression of being taller or if that idea doesn't occur without priming the concept of sticker making us grow taller). And then we clarify with a second question, specifically about a feeling of growth. "Do you feel taller?"
From the data, we can determine if the quantum sticker seems to make more people feel taller and if they come up with that feeling on their own.

3/But we could also tell the subjects from the start that the test is about a quantum sticker that makes them grow taller(in 2/ they wouldn't know what it is or what it does before the end). What we test has now changed. Now we still go with the real vs false sticker and at the end we gather statistical data to find out if those with the BS sticker had the same tendency of feeling taller. If the stats are pretty much the same for both sticker users, then we can conclude that there is a strong placebo effect. And if we also did experiment 2/, we could directly see how telling people about the effect in 3/, changed how many report a feeling of growth compared to 2/.

With 1/ on top of that, we can also associate actual growth(if there is any to find), with the use of the real sticker, and if maybe more people have grown taller in 3/ than in 2/, that would now suggest that convincing people they will grow taller, makes more of them really grow taller. Imagine that ^_^. You give a placebo to people, and they get taller from the belief that it will happen. That would be a cool discovery.

Does your hypothetical seem to you like a real situation that could ever occur?

 

[IanB52]

its not like i dont wanna know the actual truth but the more i read into these kind of topics, the more i feel like "placebo" gets thrown around way to easy and the final connection of dots is just not made because "placebo" is in the way

im pretty sure for example being extremlely anxious might just lead to oxidative stress too ( lets call it "mind-induced placebo" )

i kinda get why these studys end up with no real conclusions then...

There is a controversial topic in psychiatry/medical science at the moment: How do you rule out bias from subjects in clinical trials with psychedelic drugs? There are a few problems, first the subjects almost always guess the active treatment. This can be argued to actually bias the outcome because if the effect is strong enough that the subject can guess they got the active dose then THAT makes them think it is working and therefore they have a positive outcome. Of course, this same info can be seen as exactly the evidence that it IS working and produced the positive result.

Second you have an issue where people become very sensitive to their environment in the altered state of consciousness, so the clinicians take certain steps to promote a positive or therapeutic environment. One perspective says that you are biasing the results by shaping the experience at all. But then if the actual goal is to produce positive results, that influence is actually a necessary part of the process.

In this case, the desire to perfectly isolate all the variables and rule out bias or placebo is at odds with the desire to establish best practices that work and test the drugs within working context.

I think about stuff like energy bodywork like cranial sacral or Reiki etc. They aren't even touching the person, but something is being felt by the patient. Maybe they can feel a little bit of heat, but generally there should be no tactile sensation without contact. The question is: Do the patients believe the treatment works, and therefore they feel something, or do they feel something as a result of an unusual stimuli tickling their brain or nervous system? In this case an experience is being produced by what the practitioner does, even if there is no physical explanation. It may even be true that for the treatment to help, the patient has to be psychologically receptive to it to relax their body enough to get the effect, similar to the set+setting/environmental factors in the clinical trial above. They may actually have to anticipate and be open to what will happen, for it to happen.

There are ways to try and measure placebo effect in all of these cases, but anything that involves perception can be dynamic and complex. What this means in practice is different because we are actually looking for ways to produce the most powerful effect/outcome, and that represents guiding an interactive relationship between physical reality and the mind/body. In audio the best listening result might actually be to know what you are listening to, have some expectation of it, be attentive, and also hear something that is genuinely there. This totally flies clashes with the idea of confirmation bias. But we also know that when someone doesn't expect a stimuli (like the man in the gorilla suit) they often don't see it when it objectively appears. The most effective listening may be an interaction between expectation and auditory sense, the very scenario many would write off as placebo!

 

[bigshot]

Placebo is usually used in terms of medicine. Believing something will create healing leads to actual healing. Positive thinking creates a physical change. That’s different than listening tests of cables. Expectation bias is what we deal with here on a daily basis. There’s no physical change, just perceptual error. Placebo is a form of bias, but not the exact one we usually speak of. I remember a post where Gregorio listed a whole lot of different kinds of bias that humans are subject to. I thought at the time that the list merited a thread of its own.

 

[BS5711]

…. but people state your subjective expierence is only placebo / bias because you cant actually easily differentiate between a "mind-induced placebo" making you feel like that or an actual effect on the body, that would trigger a "placebo-like" responds where blood chemistry is still measurably altered (just like the study in point 3. suggests)

I get your sentiment here but that is talking about the possible effects of something that might have a physical effect on the body that then effects our perception. You mentioned EMF and I imagine you would include your crystals in the window.

Diluted down to something really basic one could liken it to opening a window and enjoying the breeze on a warm summer day while listening to music. The sun and breeze improved the audio quality, no they improved your mood which improved the audio experience.

That is a step removed from the simplest and by far the most common scenario of expectation bias effecting audio perception. That would be something like a new headphone cable for example. Folks will swear black and blue it does wonders to the sound yet there is no difference in a measured frequency response. The perception of dramatically improved sound quality is pure expectation messing with you ….. usually.

 

[castleofargh]

first of all, you are right, testing like you just mention in different topologys give an actual better view on things and i guess something like this is actually applied in science/research, the disconnect for me and why i started the thread happens here:

i will go with the EMF example

1. subjective expierence suggesting there is a difference
2. EEG results showing there is actually something happening in the body
3. even a study directly talking about potential side effects like headaches: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC6025786/ (actually science might be on the right track here to the actual truth?)

4. but people state your subjective expierence is only placebo / bias because you cant actually easily differentiate between a "mind-induced placebo" making you feel like that or an actual effect on the body, that would trigger a "placebo-like" responds where blood chemistry is still measurably altered (just like the study in point 3. suggests)

I don't know much on that subject. What frequency and amount of energy are we talking about? Because there is that big ball of dirt under my feet that's been generating a magnetic field for a while, and apparently, not only does it not kill us, we wouldn't stay alive for long without it.
Danger, toxicity, impact, those are usually associated with quantity and duration of exposure. Talking about EMF in general without any notion of magnitude, that seems meaningless, and in that respect, the paper you link bothers me. They're alarmists while as vague as they can manage to be. They make amalgams, signaling danger for list of stuff but the cited paper for evidence is only about kids and power lines, where the amount of energy and time of exposure is so much worse than any of the other things mentioned as a warning. Some other passage mentions a certain impact on living cells, but the link is a study on some plant. It doesn't read like a research paper but more like some activist pamphlet.
And they conclude with some BS about taking antioxidant to prevent the effect of EMF. Citing stuff on rat kidney horses and whatever. But somehow they forget to link all the papers suggesting no benefit to such practice, but on the contrary find more risk of cancer, intoxication, and other issues from overuse of antioxidant.
I'm not a fan of that paper, that does look like it's cherry-picking its evidence to suit a very clear and partisan narrative.



As for how research treats EMF impacts as placebo, is it true at all? Where is that done?

 

[sander99]

Does your hypothetical seem to you like a real situation that could ever occur?

About as real as it could occur for example that someone really hears the difference between a pure DSD recording and a pure DSD recording converted to PCM and back to DSD. But of course much less likely than the situation that someone tastes a difference in your cerreal example, which is why that was a totally ridiculous example. That example would be better to compare with the audibility of turning the bass knob to +10 dB and the treble knob to -10 dB compared to straight, a clearly and obviously audible difference.

 

[castleofargh]

Does your hypothetical seem to you like a real situation that could ever occur?

No, that was on purpose. To avoid starting a distracting partisan battle of opinion on a specific case, instead of considering our testing options in a more detached and logical way.

To extend on your example with psychedelic drugs, when the brain is involved, it often becomes hard to isolate what we're trying to test. Because the brain itself doesn't. To create the subjective experience, it uses a pudding of sensory data, memories, beliefs. That's a real PITA when we'd like to be sure that A caused B, but the entire alphabet of events and variables comes crashing down on the experiment.
On the bright side, for a psychedelic drug VS a placebo, the noticeable difference is usually quite easy to demonstrate ^_^. Now that I think of it, I remember some small experiments where people with a placebo drug behaved in a drunk-like manner, after thinking they had received a real drug. There are similar cases with "actors" among the participants, but that's more in the realm of social behavior. Drugs or anything else, it's not hard to convince someone to do what the group does. Trying to fit in a group is one of the assumed survival strategies that we tend to follow. I imagine the participants in that scenario might not feel high at all and just fake to fit in. Another problem with testing what people think or feel, they could try to tell us what we want to hear instead of what they're feeling. So now we need a part of the test to catch fakers and liars. Not simple.

 

[Ghoostknight]

I get your sentiment here but that is talking about the possible effects of something that might have a physical effect on the body that then effects our perception. You mentioned EMF and I imagine you would include your crystals in the window.

good point, yea my belief is exactly this

the thing for me is, you always listen subjectively, so if something subjectively changes your perception its (atleast for me) pretty much the same and shouldnt be excluded "just because it isnt part of the signal", every audiophile will probably say this too you "measurements dont make sense if you include your subjective expierence"

it definitely gets/is somewhat esoteric but imo its part of the overall expierence, either you get it or you dont wanna hear about it...

Diluted down to something really basic one could liken it to opening a window and enjoying the breeze on a warm summer day while listening to music. The sun and breeze improved the audio quality, no they improved your mood which improved the audio experience.

well beside opening a window actually changing your roommodes, so there probably is a audible difference, you are right, a nice breeze could just lift your mood up which leads to "better sounding audio", imo there is nothing wrong with that

i could start now with you let negative ions in trough the window uplifting your mood but all of that acts on a similar level as "placebo" your mind makes up your expierence, either you embrace it or you "try to ignore it" and only look objectively on measurements
but many subjectivists will agree with me that measurements dont tell the whole truth

 

[Ghoostknight]

just some example.... the effect my grounding boxes on top of my speaker filled with crystals do is "subjectively" on the same level as boosting the signal 1-2db or so, thats for me how big the subjective expierence feels like to give you guys some kind of ballpark, since im probably one of the few that actually play around with EQ and can tell you on which ballpark the audible difference seems to be

Now you add up 5-10 tweaks like that and you system sounds pretty different even tho measureably probably not much has changed

 

[bigshot]

Anything could affect your perception of sound from a psychological angle. But that kind of thing wouldn’t manifest in a physical ways the way placebo works in medicine. You hear what you hear and your mind interprets it in whatever way it feels at the time.

 

[Ghoostknight]

Anything could affect your perception of sound from a psychological angle.

Ever tried to listen to (louder) music while having a headache? ... probably "the" example nearly everyone can relate to

imo from expierence i can tell you can "learn" to listen to your body for these subtle changes (comparing audio tweaks is actually just one way "to listen to your body", you just use audio as a vehicle with these esoteric tweaks imo)

But that kind of thing wouldn’t manifest in a physical ways the way placebo works in medicine.

well if i go by the EMF radiation theory and why for example better shielded cables sound better there is a physical change as the studys show .... the question is how much are you affected by it, you could even see it as a good thing being "immune" to it i guess
the studys on if we can actually perceive it are mostly inconclusive with some hints depending on exposure strength etc..

Also: if your enviroment is overloaded with EMF, subtle changes like changing one cable probably doesnt make much of a difference, you need to tweak your whole system, the more its tweaked the more "negatives" like one wrong cable become more obvious imo
So there are even explanations why some people hear a difference and some dont

You hear what you hear and your mind interprets it in whatever way it feels at the time.

Well i can only speak for myself, but imo there IS a "system" behind it but depending on mood/bias it can get crazy random, unless you try to listen objectively to the sound which imo is possible to some degree...

----

Found this paper the other day, pretty comprehensive and many many references to other studys

there was even one person found that could detect reliably EMF exposure to his hand, it sounded like they were pretty sure with this and wanted followup studys with the same person, i would quote it but i cant find it anymore...

 

[castleofargh]

Once again, you only search for validation of your messed up views.
The very concept of placebo is flawed and misused, but freaking crystals making the sound better because... now that strong New Age snake oil smell is so relaxing and trustworthy.