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Comment by ipspam | Hacker News Reader

Is the effectiveness of the placebo correlated to the advertising and marketing of the product?

This appears to be the case. It's quite intriguing in some sense as the implication is that good marketing does not solely have the effect of making you buy stuff that you don't need, but additionally implants in you the expectation that something will perform well, which in turn may makes it more likely to become true.

I remember reading about this in Dan Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational".

Here's summary of the relevant chapter on Wikipedia [1]: "While the effect of placebo has been knowingly and unknowingly practiced for millennia, the interesting observation Ariely and his collaborators made was that prices of the prescribed medicine can be used as a placebo as well"

The underlying paper [2] spells this out as well: "We demonstrate that marketing actions such as pricing can alter the actual efficacy of products to which they are applied. [...]"

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predictably_Irrational#The_Pow...

[2] https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=707541

Dan Ariely has been almost completely discredited and that entire field of research in general has had almost no studies replicate.

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/stephaniemlee/dan-ariel...

I'm not sure if the link you provided supports the conclusion that Dan Ariely is "almost completely discredited". That seems overly harsh. Quoting from the tag line, "Renowned psychologist Dan Ariely literally wrote the book on dishonesty. Now some are questioning whether the scientist himself is being dishonest."

For what it's worth, the placebo study relevant to this discussion does not seem to be on the list of disputed studies from what I can tell [1]. That said, I'd be curious to know if that one also failed to replicate, please share if you have knowledge of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_Ariely#Accusations_of_data...

The 'faith' center of our brain is extremely powerful, the more a situation appears to be potentially improving, positive, normal, the better your brain will operate (based on my own weird experience).

And the price! Homeopathic medicines are ridiculously expensive. So they must work, right? ;(

The most expensive sugar pills money can buy. Exploring the failings of homeopathic medicine:

https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2011/02/the-most-expensive-sugar...

>At the recent McGill conference, “Confronting Pseudo-science, A Call to Action,” James Randi of the James Randi Educational Foundation began his presentation by downing an entire bottle of homeopathic sleeping pills. He then continued his presentation without so much as a yawn, despite the supposed effects of dozens of pills floating through his body. This anticlimactic demonstration raises the question: what exactly was in those sleeping pills?

A retrospective cost-analysis of additional homeopathic treatment in Germany: Long-term economic outcomes:

https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal...

>Conclusion: The analysis showed that even when following-up over 33 months, there were still cost differences between groups, with higher costs in the homeopathy group.

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