Quote:
Originally Posted by Adder
Only if you think benefiting from a placebo effect is "fooling yourselves."
Honestly, I do not know if a pre-existing belief in effecicacy is required for a placebo effect.
See, that's where you lose me. Lots of beliefs survive for a long time, and survival may say more of the lack of anything better.
|
In that case, I return to asking you to define "placebo." Because if something is effective, when you have serious doubts that it will be, and it has been effective on many people for a very long time, that seems to me to be the opposite of "placebo," at least in the way you were using it.
And since the definition, per dictionary.com, is "a substance having no pharmacological effect but given merely to satisfy a patient who supposes it to be a medicine," then yeah -- I'm going with the idea that it's "fooling yourself." I'm not sure what you intended the word to mean.
Threaded Mode