I believe the placebo effect can also work just by telling someone about it (and then giving them the sugar pill or whatever). However, the whole placebo effect

I believe the placebo effect can also work just by telling someone about it (and then giving them the sugar pill or whatever). However, the whole placebo effect may just be (poor understanding of) statistics, namely regression to the mean. Here's an article [0] (found via Wikipedia on placebo [1]) [0] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2796.2004.01355.x https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2796.... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Confounding_factors https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placebo#Confounding_factors