Anyway, I was just reading an article about the Placebo Effect in the Wired magazine (you can read it online too) that came in the mail yesterday, and it got me to thinking about this again.  I've posted before about the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and the double-slit experiment, the idea that multiple versions of the same event exist as a wave of potential until they're observed. The double-slit experiment in particular fascinates me because it so vividly demonstrates this mystery.

If you're not familiar with this experiment, I highly recommend watching the cartoon embedded below.  I've posted this video before, but I think it's very good and probably deserves another repost.  I like to watch it myself again from time to time:

This has fascinated me ever since I first heard about it--it's just one of those things that makes you question what you think you know about reality.  While we know that reality is really, really weird when you get down to the quantum level, there just aren't many things our size you can look see the same weirdness at the everyday level; the double-slit experiment is one of them.

The Placebo Effect is another one of those weird things that I've always found interesting.  The idea that the simple expectation of getting better can be as effective as a drug researched and developed over many years to actually cure the symptom.  While it's acknowledged and worked around, it's mostly ignored.  It's consider a nuisance in the pharmaceutical industry because drugs must perform better than it to pass FDA approval.  It's just another one of those fascinating things is just really weird and nobody is quite sure what to do with.

The common thread in both of these mysteries is that the human mind plays a pivotal role in determining the outcome.  This challenges the worldview of a lot of people and makes them very uncomfortable, so it's much easier just to view these things as oddities that haven't been figured out yet--shrug them off.

For what it's worth, I have my own theory about both of these things and how they work.  I believe that the scientists running the double slit experiment didn't run far enough back up the chain of cause and effect, and that the thing that actually collapses the wave is the choice to observe it, not the act of observing itself.  The observation is just the act that carries out the choice, the effect resulting from the mental cause.

My hypothesis is that the real reason placebos are so effective is because the people who take them choose to look for the desired effect.  They actively choose to observe the benefit of the drug, collapsing the wave of potential--the equivalent of choosing to observe the photon.

Of course, people's choices can be influenced, that's the foundation of the entire advertising industry.

One interesting bit in the Wired article is that drugs are much likelier to be effective if the person taking them has previously seen somebody else take them and watched the drug be effective for them.  Why is that?  Because they're being influenced to expect a positive outcome.

The expectation is the key--it unconsciously causes people to choose to observe a specific outcome.

Instead of choosing to observe the pill failing, they're influenced to expect success.  However, the reverse is also true--when somebody is looking for a negative response they're much more likely to see that as well.  For example, when men are told that a pill can cause sexual dysfunction they are much more likely to experience that effect, because they're looking for it.

I would assume that the reason that peanut butter has no effect on the common cold is because nobody expects it to.  If a new study came out saying that peanut butter is a wonder drug for the common cold people would start being cured left and right.  Vitamin C already does this very effectively.

There are numerous examples of placebos which have performed just as good or better than leading drugs, depending on how much researchers work at helping participants believe that they have a good chance of being helped.  This really underscores the importance of quality medical care, by the way, and not just in the "knowledge" sense but also in the sense of making the person feel good about their treatment.

Wired also has some interesting stuff on what can effect the perception and anticipation of success:  for example blue pills are more calming than red ones, and advertising definitely has a big effect.  Marketing, in other words.

To me at least, this has profound implications on the entire health care debate, as it challenges a lot of what we believe about medicine and cause and effect.  If you can get effective treatment for free, why would you pay for it (thru the nose)?  And how can we maximize this effect instead of trying to work around it?

I try to maximize this myself, simply by consciously setting the expectation that I will be healthy, especially if I start to feel sick.  I haven't had more than a head cold in the entire 7 years I've known my wife, and I've only had two of those in the past 3 years.  Coincidence?  Maybe.

I also, from personal experience, believe that this principle extends much farther than your health, it can literally affect every part of your life.  Expect success, get success.  Expect failure, get failure.  Pretty simple when you get down to it, but only a handful of people apply it.

Just my theory, it's probably worth what you paid for it.