And the Hi, I'm Peter Adamson, and you're listening to the History of Philosophy Podcast podcast brought to you with the support of the

philosophy department at Kings College London and the LMU in Munich online at history of philosophy

dot net today's episode just what the doctor ordered, Renaissance Medicine.

You've probably heard of the placebo effect,

in which patients respond positively to dummy medications like sugar pills.

While there is controversy as to just how strong the placebo effect is and what causes it,

some studies suggest that it can be astonishingly powerful.

For instance, when it comes to pain relief,

placebo's may be half as effective as actual pain medication.

This helps to explain the popularity of alternative medicine.

Crystals and homeopathic remedies presumably don't affect the body

any differently than sugar pills, but they still work insofar as they are

effective as placebo's. The effect also explains a lot about the history of medicine.

It seems at first perplexing that doctors were respected experts in pre-modern societies,

from ancient Greece and India to the medieval Islamic world,

given that these doctors largely had no idea what caused diseases or how they could be cured.

True, this was in part because they could sometimes offer real treatment.

Cataract eye surgery was performed successfully in the Islamic world for example and

effective therapies were also identified by trial and error.

Much of the benefit offered by these early doctors, though,

would have derived from the placebo effect.

The drugs that were prescribed by a doctor, like Galen or Avicicenna would rarely pass muster in a modern trial,

...