It is Thursday the 28th of May, 2026, and you are listening to Skeptics with a K, the podcast for

science, reason, and critical thinking. Skeptics with the case produced by skeptic media

in association with the Merseyside Skeptic Society,

a non-profit organisation for the promotion of scientific skepticism on Merseyside around the UK

and internationally. I'm your host, Mike Hall. With me today is Marsh. Hello. And Alice.

Hello. And coming up today, we're going to be doing placebo effects. We're going back to the old

favorites. What a surprise. You're going to be talking about placebo effects, are you? I'm going to be talking about the nocebo effect in this case. It was an article I came out in The Guardian recently about that. So we're going to be talking about that later on. Yes, I think I saw that article. I think several listeners saw that article and sent it to all of us to say, Mike needs

to be all of this. I'm fearful that I'm going to become a learning to drive ball on this show and in

general life, but I've been learned to drive. I don't know if, I don't know if listeners know this.

Don't know if I mentioned it. I'm nursing a really bad injury. Okay. To you or the car. To me. What have you done? How can you learn to drive that badly? You're actually injured? It's not that I'm learning to drive badly. It's more that my body is shite. Marsh is teaching you. You're definitely learning to drive badly. I'm a good driver and I'm a good instructor actually. I'm doing a good job. We haven't fallen out yet. There are times that I've told you to be in a different lane and you go, shush. That yet, I think, is doing a lot of heavy lifting there, Alice. A lot of heavy lifting done there. So what have you done? How have you injured yourself? So we didn't go out for drive for a a little while because we were both away as we talked about in the last episode and we came back and we went out for a little drive and the next day I noticed I was getting a little bit of rib pain. I was like, I'm not sure why I've got rib pain. And listeners might, some very long time listeners might remember, this has been an issue for me before many, many years ago, probably more than a decade ago when I was working in the lab, I used to get issues with my

ribs from doing cell culture and separating cells by pressing down quite hard with a pipette,

pushed half of my rib cage in a little bit too far and pushed the other half of my rib cage

out a bit too far. Yes. I have really bad rib troubles because of that, which was eventually diagnosed as rib dysfunction, which is because I have a connected tissue disorder that means that none of my joints, like, hold themselves in place very well. So as soon as you put pressure on them, they start to, like, slip out in random directions. So I know I already have rib problems, but they haven't flared up for a long time since I stopped doing cell culture. And then I started having this pain the next day after going out for a drive. And I didn't clock it as driving at all. It was like a full 20, more than 24 hours after we'd been out for the drive. I'd gone out for dinner with Emma. We were having a nice chat. And I got home and I was like, oh, my ribs are just a little bit sore. I didn't think that much of it. I have joint problems all the time. And then the next day we got in, Marsh and I got in the car to drive to Form B. We thought, well, we'll go for a little, a slightly longer drive. A good 45 minutes, 50 minute run out. Daytime. So we'll go, we'll drive up and we'll drive back in the minute I change the gear from first into second.

I was like, okay, that's what caused the rain. All right, okay. This is where every American listener and every one of the listeners who thinks you should be buying an electric car, you're saying, well, this is why you should drive an automatic. Yeah, this is why you should be in an automatic. So it turns out...

So I'll take you out and teach you to drive in my car, Alice.

First into second, pulls on my...

And I shouldn't be using rib muscles to do that movement,

but apparently I'm dependent on weird muscles in weird places.

So you just need to drive in corsetry from now on.

You're all held together? Second into third is fine. Third into fourth is fine. It's that pulling outwards and down at the same time on the side of my ribs that

was already protruding too far and already, like I already know I carry too much. Whenever I do any core exercises,

I have to work really hard to shift the tension from my ribs down into my core. I really heavily

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