The placebo effect is when someone's sick gets better by taking a fake bill that contains

no actual medicine, or they get fake injections, or even fake surgery.

The effect is not in your head.

The results are scientific and measurable.

That already sounds crazy, but it gets a lot crazier.

We have these expectation effects that go kind of beyond the medical setting into things

like how easily you can perform a workout, you know, how well you can get fit, the effects

of sleep loss, even the effects of your mindset on aging and how quickly you age.

These are all expectation effects that go away beyond what we once knew about the placebo effect.

I'm David Poe and you're about to hear some very strange, unsung sites.

Hey, prime members, you can listen to Unsung Science Add Free on Amazon Music.

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Few things are more devastating than a loved one that's gone missing.

From Wondry, the vanished is a podcast where host Marissa Jones tells stories of missing persons

that have gone overlooked. Listen to the vanished podcast wherever you get your podcast,

or you can listen Add Free by joining Wondry Plus in Apple Podcasts or the Wondry app.

Season two, episode 15, what if placebos are the medicine?

Every modern army employs medics to treat the wounded soldiers.

And in World War II, anesthesiologist Henry Beecher was one of them.

And what he found was that when he was creating soldiers, he found that often,

you know, they seemed kind of not need pain relief when they came off the battle.

And this got him kind of wondering whether it was just the pure relief of having been saved

...