Tumblr posts that I made in youtube comments first -- part the next:
Placebo isn't fake though. People misunderstand placebo effect a lot, because they think it means "thinking it's making you better when it's not" when it's closer to "thinking it's making you better helps you get better because your body assumes it will and reacts accordingly". Nocebo also exists where you can shut down a drug's ability to effect you properly by just disbelieving in it hard enough (which is eerie af to see happen in the wild; ever see someone take a narcotic or hallucinogen and *nothing* happens? I have, just as much as I've seen people get drunk -- like literally physically intoxicated by every usual metric but blood alcohol we use to judge such things -- on mixers they think is spiked but isn't. Fkn wiiild. Related: Psychosomatic isn't fake neither, it's mental/emotional issues causing real documentable medical problems, like say stress fevers. It's not like the fever's fake, the cause is just internal rather than invasive). Bodies are weirder than we give them credit for. Snakeoil can be shockingly effective actually; as much as we're not supposed to admit that out loud, it's still true for better and worse.
(Edit: @vstheworld you might find this whole thing triggering, I'm sorry. I'm not even sure what to tag it to be useful filtering for you; you might just wanna skip both halves of this diatribe. I didn't know how else to usefully warn you.)
For context -- because I get into a couple tangents (or maybe it's I actually get to the point about what the comment I'm presumably responding to actually said? //snort//) in the second half here where the context becomes useful-to-necessary I think -- this all was from a video on the Fallout tv show and a thread on a theory -- basically -- that the ghoul feralization drug is actually placebo (as part of a broader discussion on if going feral is a psychological/mental or brain/physical illness, as well as whether there's an actual distinction between the two or if we're counterproductively separating pink from red again) which is why nobody else anywhere or at any other time finds need or even use of it while our dude is so convinced he needs it, and I specifically responding to someone who misunderstood that to mean "fake". Fake drug which can therefore successfully treat the equally fake (mental) disease unlike if it was caused by physical brain damage which they assumed the fake drug *wouldn't* be able to treat and too obviously a scam for the NCR to be distributing, like medicine is that easy.
To be super clear, there's good reason we've decided to nocebo placebo. Gets too close to victim blaming people for getting sick and giving malicious conmen a pass. Because bodies are *weird* and "just believe you'll get better hard enough and you will" would be just as simple and thus incorrect a statement as "beliefs have no effect on the success of a treatment and any evidence they do is made up/imagined/fake". Please don't mistake me for an antivax homeopathy faith healing grifter
(though the fact that antivaxers do make any vaccines forced on them less effective by their disbelief is fking infuriating honestly, I hate that they're kinda right while being completely wrong about why they're right AND tainting the belief in people around them making the vaccines less effective across the entire group while they're at it making themselves *more* right while still being so catastrophically wrong about *why* //flips table//), that's not my point. We filter medical science for placebo for a good reason. I'm not anti-science, I'm just *very* aware that medical science in particular is one of the places with the highest replication crisis and confirmation bias issues because bodies are so much more complicated than we're currently capable of understanding or managing to compensate for because we keep trying to understand them like biochemical machines when they're actually micro-ecosystems. Half my diseases (fibro, ptsd, female AuDHD, fking migraines) weren't considered "real" until twenty to even ten years ago until we figured out how to find the physical evidence of them. (Still can't believe for how long migraines were just considered hysteria -- the fking 1970's -- considering my doctor looked at my brainscan and showed me the specific symptomatic physical scarring migraines leave on the brain, now that we know that and can make those kinds of tests. Medicine is a *very* flawed science.) It's just, like, no yeah I can absolutely see the NCR distributing glorified sugar pills and not knowing any better. It's not like the post-apocalypse has a thriving public scientific authority -- the Institute wasn't sharing. They're gonna do what humans have always done with medical science: try things, look for trends and distribute what seems to work and make a hypothesis on why later that may or may not be actually accurate. That's really not very different from most current psychiatric drugs tbh. (Of all the parts of the body we don't understand, we don't understand the brain the most. Both in isolation and how it effects anything else; the science around the gut/brain/skin axes is insane. Antibiotics can cause depression, SSRIs treat intestinal inflammation, and oh, another infuriating thing about antivaxers? Vaccines don't *cause* autism but they do temporarily disrupt the gut biome in a way that irritates the brain and exacerbates autistic "symptoms" in a way that could make them more obvious/extreme and are given at the point in a child's development where you start to notice them anyway and I *hate* that they're not entirely wrong while being ENTIRELY DANGEROUSLY WRONG //chews on a table leg in frustration//... Ugh, that was a huge tangent. Medical science -- both its history and application -- was a hyperfixation/special interest of mine both out of intellectual interest and the self-education necessity being professionally disabled unfortunately requires of one to survive, sorry. N e ways) Either a psychiatric medication barely passes placebo (most anti-depressants) but we don't say that too loud to not ruin the life-saving therapeutic use *of* that placebo, or we have no goddamned idea why that specific chemical intervention helps it just *does* so blackbox treatment use it I guess(a lot of the newer antipsychotics; not psychiatric, but the most successful pharmaceutical treatment I ever got for my Crohn's disease when it was real bad was a low dose chemo drug and nobody knows *why* it helps -- they figured it out by accident through observing comorbid autoimmune disease cancer patients and then trying it on patients without the cancer) or both. Seems about right tbh that the premiere treatment for ghoul senility to be a mass delusion AND STILL WORK. Most authentically Fallout thing in the tv show, that blackly hilarious contradiction of medical pharmaceutical history past and current.
