The High Price of the Nocebo Effect

I haven't read the article but Dr Ben Goldacre has written some great stuff on this. Incidentally he was the first person to get me engaged in science as a teenager, and I love his catchphrase: "I Think You'll Find It's a Bit More Complicated Than That".

http://www.badscience.net/2009/11/all-bow-before-the-mighty-...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1Q3jZw4FGs

This is a shameless plug and only marginally related, but I've done a decent amount of self research in buying dumb supplements and hoping they work (especially with nootropics).

I created https://betterself.io/, open-sourced at https://github.com/jeffshek/betterself, but the gist of it was -- how do I find out what supplements are really just the placebo effect versus having a strong correlation (positive or negative) on my productivity/sleep?

Aggregating data across either 7/14 periods removed a lot of noise and let me improve on the supplements I was already buying (and let me dump out a lot).