The following Mark's Daily Apple article was written by Mark Sisson,

and is narrated by Tina Lehman.

Can you harness the placebo effect in your own life?

Every parent listening to this has dealt extensively in placebo,

the analgesic effect of the ouchy kiss.

When your child bumps his head or skins her knee,

the quickest way to ease pain isn't a Band-Aid, Icepack, or Tylenol.

It's a kiss. Works every time.

But your kid only thinks it's helping.

You're just tricking him. Maybe, but so what? In common parlance, placebo is a bad thing,

connoting uselessness, ineffectiveness, and treachery. Placibos are smoke and mirrors, snake oil. Even the words clinicians used to describe the

placebo arm of a trial, sham treatment, dummy pill, sugar pill, suggest placebo effects are nuisances

impending scientific progress. They're inert. That they're completely pharmacologically inactive defines them. But I'm here to

argue that the placebo isn't just a necessary artifact of randomized controlled trials. It describes

a very real effect that people can probably use to improve their lives. First of all, there's

no single placebo effect.

There are placebo effects.

We see them all over the health arena.

In physical pain, many people assume the analgesic, pain-killing effects of placebo are a reinterpretation

of the pain sensation.

The pain isn't actually going away, you're just handling

it better in some non-corporial way. That's certainly part of it, but in 1978, researchers

...