https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/01/31/powerless-placebos/
https://www.dcscience.net/2015/12/11/placebo-effects-are-wea...
> The most important study on the placebo effect is Hróbjartsson and Gøtzsche’s Is The Placebo Powerless?, updated three years later by a systematic review and seven years later with a Cochrane review. All three looked at studies comparing a real drug, a placebo drug, and no drug (by the third, over 200 such studies) – and, in general, found little benefit of the placebo drug over no drug at all. There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain – but overall H&G concluded that the placebo effect was clinically insignificant. Despite a few half-hearted tries, no one has been able to produce much evidence they’re wrong. This is kind of surprising, since everyone has been obsessing over placebos and saying they’re super-important for the past fifty years.
That's not the topic at hand here, which is "is the PE real?". For me it absolutely is.
> while a sugar pill doesn't make a tumor disappear, it can be very good at pain management.
And now you go to this version:
> There were some possible minor placebo effects in a few isolated conditions – mostly pain
So is it real or not? We're just saying the same thing, what's the point of saying it doesn't exist and then revert back to exactly what was said originally?
Correlation is not causation, as they say.
(Hope your depression is gone or at least not too bad now days, regardless of what drugs or placebos may have played a part!)