Hello, Conspirituality Podcast listeners. Welcome to a sample of a Patreon bonus episode.

We release these every week for our subscribers. They're usually solo essays from our team.

It costs $5 a month for access, and the support helps to keep us ad-free and editorially

independent. You can sign up at patreon.com-conspirituality. Thank you.

It's pretty obvious that clinical trials are always a risk. Volunteers gamble with

unproven medications and often for a little reward. Yet participation in clinical trials

is critical for pushing medicine forward, and results sometimes reveal more than you might

expect. So consider a study from 2006, in which two treatments for severe arm pain were

tested. Acupuncture and painkillers. Within two weeks of the trial beginning, almost one-third

of the 270 patients complained of severe side effects. They were sluggish. The pills made it impossible

for them to get out of bed. And those blasted acupuncture needles caused swelling and redness.

The interesting thing was every volunteer was forewarned about these potential side effects. In

fact, they were the exact side effects the administrators said were possible. Discovering whether

acupuncture offers more pain relief than pills was going to be a challenge given these circumstances.

But that actually wasn't the point of this study. Harvard University professor of medicine Ted

Capchick might have been trained in herbalism and acupuncture, but he had a different goal in mind.

So for this, he used sham needles, so no one's skin was ever, ever actually punctured.

And the painkillers? 100% corn scarch. There was no control group. Everyone received a placebo.

And yet dozens of volunteers still suffered from side effects.

Placebo research reveals that thinking medicine is in the bottle stimulates neurochemical activity.

And this is before you even put anything in your mouth or into your arm or whatever those needles

were going. Placebo interventions have been shown to reduce depression, arthritis, irritable bowel

...