The crazy power of the placebo effect💥

Our brain’s are prediction machines. We don’t just passively perceive the world, we actively generate it. The world we experience comes as much, if not more, from the inside as from the outside. Our brain’s expectations are intricately woven into everything we experience.

Few scientific ideas have generated as much excitement - or as much outrage - as the placebo effect and the potential of the mind-body connection.

Take for example a study published in 2007 about finasteride - a medication that is often used to treat men with an enlarged prostate. The drug is known to cause erectile dysfunction and low libido - features you explained prominently in leaflets and health websites.

To find out if this information is exacerbating men’s frustration, a team from the University of Florence set up a year long trial in which half of the participants were explicitly warned of the side effects and the other half were not.

Out of the group that got the warnings 30% had experienced the symptoms. Compared to only 10% in the oblivious group. That is a 3-fold increase in a quality of life altering side effect simply for a piece of information.

The same thing was seen in a group of patients that took aspirin to prevent angina. The group that was warned about the side effects of of imitation to the stomach and intestine were 6 times more likely to stop their treatment due to increased nausea and indigestion.

That is the power of the expectation effect (also the name of the book I learnt this from)

Now obviously it would be unethical for doctors to withhold information from patients. But multiple studies show that simply reframing how you carry over the information can already significantly decrease the amount of side effects experienced. For example rather than saying 10% of people will experience headaches - say 90% of people will not experience headaches.

Now these were just some simple examples from probably the coolest science book I’ve read - The Expectation Effect by David Robson. And all of them came from the first chapter. The book dives so much deeper into the expectation effect of exercise, food, intelligence and even ageing and how are minds can change our physiology based on our expectations.

I’ll make more emails breaking down some of the most important examples from this revolutionary book.

If you like discussions around books, their lessons and breaking them down - you will definitely enjoy my book club. We will be reading the coolest and most valuable books (science, mindset, psychology, wealth and money) together and help each other deepen our knowledge and apply it to improve ourselves and our lives. It’s called The Read2Rise BookClub and you can join it by clicking the button below.