Is it unethical to market the placebo effect?

The placebo effect refers to the effect patients have when they receive the null treatment. One might think that the null treatment would do nothing.

Clinical trials are set up in such a way that there’s double blind treatments. Only some of a group are tested, and it’s unclear to the people being tested which. Instead of being given a pill, volunteers might be given a sugar tablet.

Interestingly, the comparison of whether a treatment works is the difference between the treatment and someone taking the sugar pill. Yet, taking the “sugar pill” often comes with positive effects as a result of people believing that they’re being treated. Clinical researchers try and temper the effects of optimism and being led to believe positive things by comparing in this way.

What if reacting positively to the placebo is a feature, not a bug? If our ultimate goal is to improve patient well-being, shouldn’t our standard be directly comparing effects before and after a treatment, regardless of whether the treatment is bogus?

Just because a mechanism is seen as foolish doesn’t seem like enough of a reason to discard the positive effects associated with it. For instance, Christianity gives people weird epistemological beliefs, but it can comfort people in their time of struggle. If our ultimate goal is to improve their well-being, who are we to call something irrational?

In some sense, we selectively apply this norm of discouraging the placebo. The sheepskin effect, particularly surrounding education seems placebo in nature.

My basic model of college is that people basically signal their competence with a healthy dose of magical thinking and conformity.

I highly doubt college truly makes people smarter- and there’s little evidence to prove this. Interpreting the data by looking at third year dropouts versus college graduates suggests that the college intervention is somewhat fake. College dropouts make only slightly more than high school graduates, even though they’ve had the intervention of college for several years. But, college graduates tend to make significantly more.

Very few people want to ban college advertising, despite there being little to no evidence of RCTs, or rigorous controls. It could easily be the case that college is the placebo effect. Yet, in other spheres of life, for example, medicine, it is frowned upon.