Citation Needed - The Placebo Effect

Episode Date: March 25, 2026

A placebo (/pləˈsiːboʊ/ pluh-SEE-boh) is a medicine or treatment intended to appear genuine to its recipient, but which has no pharmaceutical effect.[1][2] Common placebos include inert tablets (like sugar pills), inert injections (like saline), sham surgery,[3] and other procedures.[4]

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Hello and welcome the citation needed. The podcast where we choose the subject, read a single article about it on Wikipedia and pretend we're experts. Because this is the internet? That's how it works now. I'm Eli Bosnick and I'll be faking it until I make it tonight, but I'll need a few pills to make it all go down smooth. First up, three people who are not in the horrible. collection of child abuse known as the Epstein Pellon. No, it's just my life. Actually, just my life.

I am in the Pedestia emails. Pizza is something Italian. You have to be allowed to talk about cheese pizza. Absolutely. You have to be able to say it. I think it's the fact that you said you were going to fuck it to death that really confused those

policemen. You have to be allowed to say you're going to fuck cheese pizza to death and be talking about the food only. speech. Heath says that about a lot of his meals, though. That's what you've got to bear in mind. Really helped at his trial. And also joining us tonight, Michael Marshall. Okay, so you assume I'm the only one of us in the Epstein files. But listeners, ask yourself this. Why do you think Heath really goes by a pseudonym? You know, do a search of his real name. You'll see exactly what I mean. Isn't that right, Lawrence Krause?

Wow. I'm sorry I didn't mean I'm sorry That guy's way smarter than me Way shoulder Not that way way shorter So much shorter Before we begin tonight

I'd like to take a moment To thank our patrons Patrons Patrons without you and And also Marsh I would have so much money From CBT bullshit Which fittingly is largely a placebo

But maybe I could sell you Just a little on the side Eli What he doesn't even do QED anymore. He doesn't even can't. Fine. It's fine. I'd like to learn how join their ranks. Be sure to stick around today in this show. By the way, tell us, I'm a person by thing. I don't know. Today we'll be talking about the placebo effect.

And Marsh, you've spoken about this quite a bit. Or at least I believe you have. Are you ready to have an equivalent effect whether or not that's... Yeah, that's your roundabout way of saying you've not been listening to me and you've learned nothing, isn't it? I mean, yeah, obviously. It's a tell it, Marsh. What is the placebo effect? That goes before everything Eli says, what Monty said.

When I was first encountering skepticism in the late Nauties, calling them that forever. It's what they're called over here in the UK. I don't know what to tell you. They get called the Norties. There were certain mantras and missives that we all collectively learned, like that chiropractors aren't real back doctors and neither are osteopaths, or that homeopaths believed in the magical memory of water,

and that psychics relied on cold and hot reading techniques in order to calm the grieved. These were like the critical thinking canon, the required reading that we had to do if we wanted to be good skeptics. And they were obviously very useful lessons, but while we were learning about the tricks used by quacks to fake interesting results, we were also learning about some of the more counterintuitive scientific facts about the real world. and none were more counterintuitive than what we were learning about the placebo effect.

I just think it's adorable that Marsh presumes that most skeptics began with a sort of intellectual hero's journey rather than just like obstinacy, contrarianism, and a passing grade in high school science. I don't have the heart to break it to Marsh that I'm literally only on our side

because the YouTube algorithm gave me hitchlap videos instead of, I don't know, William Lane Craig Breakers or whatever there. I think Marsh knows that. But, you know, stop the average person on the street and ask them what they think placebo means. And they'll probably tell you it's something like mind over matter or the power of positivity or that if you believe you're on the mend, you'll be able to think yourself well. And they might tell you that it's why things like homeopathy and chiropractor are totally fine for people to believe in. because if the patient thinks they're getting better, they actually will get better,

regardless of how ineffective their treatment is. In my experience, that can extend all the way to people believing you're able to cure yourself of cancer with just the power of your mind. Okay, and it's not just the average person on the street. Even elite intellectuals, like podcasters are pretty sure lying to make me feel better, is what I've heard that. But those rubs are going to get proven wrong today. Obviously, we all agree.

And if that random person that you stopped on the street happened to have been a skeptic from the early 2000s, they might even add some specifics, like that the color or the branding of the pill that you're taking affects how big a placebo effect you'll get from it. Or that taking two sugar pills gets a stronger placebo response than taking one sugar pill. and that placebo asthma inhalers work just as well as real inhalers,

and that if you tell someone you performed an operation on them, but really you just cut them open and then stitch them back together again, they'll get better just as quickly as if you'd actually perform the real operation. Or that Doge really did cut all that waste, fraud, and abuse. They actually did it. They had that big wall. Ah, yeah, Cecil, the old economic trickle-down placebo. And that's so much trickle-down in the case of,

Musk is sort of like a cling and drip placebo, but I mean, fuck this fuck, I guess. I mean, I feel like not to be the guy who knows the end of the story, but I feel like if those things were true, people wouldn't bother making real inhalers, right? Nothing has to be cheaper than stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And look, all of this obviously sounds completely wild. And it was even described by medical doctor and science writer Ben Goldacre in his 2008 book Bad Science as one of the most bizarre and enlightening areas of medical research. And that's where I first heard all about the power of the placebo. Ben Goldhaker's book was hugely influential in the UK sceptical movement of the time,

and he'd give talks on the wonders of the placebo effect at events all across the country. If you attended a skeptics in the pub in the early 2010s, you probably did hear all about the bizarre and disparate influences the placebo effect has. You possibly even heard them from me. Yeah, there are literally tens of people now nodding their heads. Yeah. My question is how you found the time to do QED when you were drowning in all that poon? Look, to Goldacre's small credit, buried in his lengthy chapter about how strange and amazing the placebo effect truly is, he added, quote,

I understand this might well seem improbable. The challenge is this. See if you can come up with a better explanation. for what is a seriously strange set of experimental results. If you've a good explanation for how it might have come about, the world would like to hear from you, unquote. And well, one person who took up that specific challenge was my good friend and podcasting colleague, Mike Hall.

So, yeah, full disclosure, this isn't so much read a single Wikipedia page and now I'm an expert. It's more spent a decade listening to a dogged researcher with a bit between his teeth and then wholly rip off his work. I always knew Andy Wilson was the brains behind your voice. And look, before we get to some of the specific medical claims about the placebo effect, it is worth reflecting on why people are so willing to believe that doing nothing can do something

if you just do nothing the right way. And look, part of it stems from the spread of new age culture from the late 60s onwards, with its focus on being able to affect reality with the power of thought. But also, a solid chunk of the acceptance of the placebo effect is based on the scientific literature itself. particularly the work of one man, Henry Beecher. Henry Beecher was an American medical doctor and anesthetist who wrote extensively about the placebo effect, including his 1955 paper, The Powerful Placibor, which almost every subsequent mention of the placebo effect in the medical literature cites.

And more specifically, people cite Beecher's inspiration to even start looking into the amazing impact of placebo's, which stemmed from his time serving with the United States Army during the Second World War. Beecher was working at a field hospital which ran out a morphine to use on the wounded soldiers. So out of desperation, he gave them injections of salt water. But the soldiers responded as though they'd actually be given morphine. And as a result, Beecher started to investigate the placebo effect and the amazing field of placebo research was born. Okay, I knew my stage whiskey tasted salty. I knew what was happy. I know you had switched it. I was acting drunk for your benefit, for fun for you.

I know this is like a given now, but I feel like let's give them nothing and see if medicine matters was a hard first cell. Yeah. So here's the thing. That isn't the real story. Because even though this tale about the wounded soldiers receiving saline solution appears throughout the medical literature as the origin of Beecher's interest in placebo, Beecher himself never actually mentioned. it anywhere in his extensive writings on the placebo effect. You set up a trap and I felt right.

People have been through his private archives at Harvard. There's nothing there about this story. Mike Hall and fellow science writer Jonathan Jarry spent time trying to figure out where this war story even came from. And the best that they could find was Beecher describing in 1946 how he would give sedatives rather than morphine to some of the soldiers that were suffering from shock. but that's not the placebo effect. He also sold those guys

a dime bag of dried oregano. I knew that joint tasted Italian. I know what was happening. Now, there was a placebo morphine war hospital story, but it was in a 1978 episode of the TV series MASH,

involved in a plot line where soldiers during a morphine shortage were given sugar and then told it was morphine. And this might even have been part of the myth's origin. because there is no reference in the scientific literature to Beecher's war story until after that mash episode aired.

Some might say it was sort of a mashup. However, completely by chance, New Light was shown on all of this recently. When Mike mentioned it on a patron live stream we were doing for Skeptics with a K, and a listener by the name of David McConnell went off and found a 2010 article on the history of the placebo, which did tell the war story, but cited it to father Joseph Wegener, a German Jesuit in World War I. And according to Wegener,

injured soldiers begged for morphine and even threatened to denounce their God if they didn't get any morphine, so the Jesuits just gave them saline injections. And crucially, nowhere in that entire story, does it claim it actually helped the soldiers at all? It saved their souls, Marsh. They're souls!

They probably just thought it would transubstantiate into the opiates. It's an easy mistake to manage. Still, all of that being said, Beecher was undeniably interested in the placebo effect. And his paper, the powerful placebo, was essentially the founding of the scientific investigation into the placebo. Beecher analyzed the placebo arms of 15 different studies that he says were chosen at random. though it is worth pointing out his entirely random choice included at least five studies that he'd authored by himself. Okay, okay, but he told himself they were all random and he believed himself, so they were like, this was like 10% random. And the thing about those papers is none of those papers were actually about the strength of the placebo response.

They were about other things like treating headaches or anxiety or sea sickness. They were papers testing a treatment against a placebo to see if the treatment worked. But then Beecher noted that even the people given placebals in the studies seemed to get better. For example, there was a 1933 study into the common cold from which Beecher concluded that the fact that people felt better after several days, even when they only got a placebo, was proof that they'd been cured by placebo. Rather than, for example, colds usually get better after a few years. The placebo effect. It's a miracle cure if the problem you have will eventually cure itself. Yeah.

And similarly, in a study about treatments for angina, caliente. He concluded that even the placebo treatments significantly help patients. Except the thing is, patients in the placebo arm who were doing badly were moved into the treatment arm where they got the real drugs. And then they were moved back into the placebo arm. And then they were moved back into the placebo once they were feeling better. I'm stupid. Nice.

And also the conclusion that he draws from some of the studies just made up the numbers in the study because it was 195 and who was going to check that? Nobody. Until a plucky British skept that tried to distract everyone from his appearance in the Epstein files. Okay. Jesus.

So this landmark paper. Marshall, you about to attack Iran? So this landmark paper concluded that of the 1,082 patients across all 15 studies, 35% recovered by placebo alone. But when researchers in 1997 did check beaches working out, they found nothing in his paper stood up at all. Well, that's not very much. So the story that first got people thinking placebo effect was powerful,

suggested nothing of the sort. and then the paper on which formed the very foundations of placebo research was almost complete bollocks. But that wouldn't stop medical researchers and young skeptics from proclaiming all manner of extraordinary things could be caused by the power of the mind alone. All right. Well, we've concluded that I'm a scientific researcher. So while we investigate that, we'll take a little break for some apropos of nothing. In conclusion, we found that children who were abandoned were 100% more likely to deal with home invasions, overeating, and early exposure to violent cinema. Sorry, real quick. Yes, a question from the panel.

Yeah. How strange. Yeah, okay. You're just, you're describing home alone, the movie. What? Yeah, I'm looking at your paper sources here, and I don't, well, there aren't any citations. and I think you're literally describing the plot of home alone. Well, of course, not.

Life's work. And also, we also found that snowmen would often intercede. It's Jack Ross. I'm doing Jack Frost. I was going to do Jack Frost next. As we headed this spring, I've been craving fewer distractions and more focused throughout my day. Tom, quick, Eli is caught under the book.

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More like endorsed, am I right? Because he died. Wait, too soon? Are we going to say too soon? No. No. Cheers. Cheers.

Hey podcast listener. After last week's episode, literally tens of thousands of you reached out to check in on the relationship of Heath and Money Buddy. That's right, Noah. Money Buddy and I try to keep our relationship private, but some of that did spill over onto our program, so I think we owe you some form of explanation. That's right, Money Buddy.

One day at a time. I just feel like we weren't speaking the same language. Well, then you might want to try Babble. I'm all. See, you know, that's fine. That's fine. I'm okay with you stealing the point. Just now that was fine. You are, though. I'm just saying I'm cool. If you've ever felt overwhelmed by the idea of learning a new language, you're not alone. Studies show that 70 to 90% of people learning a new language give up. Fortunately, Babel's built so that it's really easy to get started. They understand that people learn differently. So you can dive into a podcast when you don't quite feel like a quick lesson. You can speak out loud to get the practice in. You can explore courses based on specific topics and even create your own customized review list, all within the app.

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bar shop on my French for an upcoming trip. I love how the lessons are about the stuff I'll actually use. Not just vocab lists and flashcards. That's why I, Cecil something Italian, personally endorse Babel. Here we go. You're the victim because your behavior made things uncomfortable. Really?

Here's a special limited time deal for our listeners. Right now you can get up to 60% off your Babbel subscription at babel.com forward slash citation. Get up to 60% off at babble.com slash citation. That's B-A-B-B-B-E-L-com slash citation. Rules and restrictions may apply. Great, great. Well, go then.

Go. Go. I'm tired of wasting my time. This bit feels like it's gotten out of hand. Yep. Yeah, they do that. Go. And we're back.

Or maybe that we're. just in my head. What happened next March? The history of the supposedly powerful placebo is based on a story that maybe didn't happen, or if it did, it didn't happen where or when it was said to have happened, and it didn't show what it was said to have shown.

And we've also seen that a landmark paper that kicked off all of this interest was flawed to the point that it was later discredited. But none of that actually matters if modern research really does show all of the many weird and wonderful attributes that placebo pills are supposed to have. After all, medical researchers in the 21st century aren't just parroting work from 70 years ago, and books like bad science are filled with newer, more contemporary studies that apparently

demonstrate the common wisdom about the power of mind over matter. And who am I to question that? Or rather, who am I to copy the questions that Mike Hall raises about that? Did Mike threaten to kick your ass if he said his shit on our show? We'll get him another suit. Does he want another suit? We'll get a six for a dollar. He buys him in pizza boxes. He does. Yeah.

Cecil, can you talk to your people? The thing about a lot of modern placebo research is that it provides a perfect illustration about how a large and complex story can be built on extremely shaky grounds, as long as researchers are ideologically motivated to avoid asking the kind of questions that might bring that whole structure down. Take, for example, one of the key claims that taking two sugar, pills produces a stronger placebo response than taking one sugar pill. Plenty of researchers have explained this away as testimony to what Goldacre writes about as the cultural aspect of medicine. Essentially, we train our minds to react to the performative ritual of medical intervention even when the pills are inert. But what those researchers don't do

is really look at the actual study that the claims are based on. The opposite of this is taken an edible every nine minutes because they aren't working yet. Okay, it's a bad idea. If you rotate between real ones and sugar gummies, it still works, just like you said. You cut the cost of that. It's awesome. You get crazy stoned in both cases. That's clinically tested by me. That's a fatal.

It's true. Yeah, no. So in this case, as bad science tells us, the two pills of stronger study was from an anthropologist called Daniel Merman, who found that not only do prescibles work better the more of them you take, but also that the placebo effect is geographically specific. literally saying in his paper that pliceibles are stronger in Germany than in Denmark because patients are responding to

symbolic stimulus, which I guess Germans are more likely to respond to than the Danish. I'm sorry, Marsh, I wasn't listening although I think you said I could have two Danishes though. And his paper, no way, I want two Danishes, Marsh.

There's plenty in the box. Nobody else wants them, Tom. Mermin's paper looked at a number of studies into how to treat gastric ulcers, and then he threw away the data about the actual treatments so we could just compare the placebo arms of each study. And he found that the studies where patients took pills four times a day were more likely to recover from their ulcers than those taking pills twice a day. Now, that's already stupid, because the reason we have a placebo arm is to deal with all the small idiosyncrasies of doing a study that you can't easily capture in the data. You know, if you're

measuring device is slightly inaccurate, that's fine because it's inaccurate for all patients. If you disregard certain outlying data points, that's fine because you're applying that criteria to all data points equally in the treatment arm and the placebo arm, while the next guy, doing the next trial, might have different criteria that he applies to all of his data equally. But then when you compare his placebo data to yours, really what you're doing is comparing his judgment calls and inaccuracies to your judgment calls and inaccuracies and then deciding whose wins.

Okay, this is just what I do when I talk to people. Marsh is being weird this week, right? He's being weird? It gets even stupid than that because Merman was looking at data about gastric ulcers gathered from studies conducted before we knew that ulcers weren't a product of stress but were caused by bacterial infection.

And given that we were wrong at the time about what caused ulcers and what therefore treated ulcers, those papers all compared an ineffective treatment against an inert treatment, and then he compared the inert treatment arms from across those studies. Oh, man, ineffective and inert would be such a huge improvement

over anything our current HHS secretary recommends. Okay, what I'm taking away from this, my idiot, antivexer friend, he can slather himself with honey or simple, syrup instead of ivermectin and get the same result and save some money. So I will let him know about that. Also, because we didn't know at the time that ulcers were caused by bacteria, those studies didn't bother asking people whether they were taking antibiotics, despite the fact that antibiotics would have been treating the ulcers. And some of these studies were from the 1980s or even

earlier when antibiotics were just handed out like skittles. So people were inadvertently taking the very things that would actually cure their ulcer, but then they weren't telling the researchers because the researchers weren't asking. And apparently they were doing that more so in Germany, where I just presume the over-prescription of antibiotics was just more common at the time. In fact, what Merman found was that the older the study, the stronger the apparent placebo effect. And that's actually something that's come up in other placebo studies too. There's a metronalysis showing that painkillers were 27% more effective than placeboles in 1990, but they're just 9% more effective in 2013.

And that's led researchers to wonder, why is the placebo effect getting stronger and stronger as the decades go by? But again, this is one of those blinked questions, because when they say the placebo effect is getting stronger, what they mean is the gap between placebo arm and treatment arm is getting smaller than it used to be. And that's because study design used to be wildly sloppy back in the day. Beach had got away with

well you don't have a cold today so the sugar pill must be magic he got away with that for decades Placeboles aren't getting stronger researchers are just getting better at designing studies and the biases and the noise therefore end up being equally present in both the placebo arm and the treatment arm

and they cancel each other out or let's take this possibility seriously or the people of today have way more psychic positivity now compared to them thanks to this spirit of connection fostered by the social internet. That's possible. Could be, could be. So, honestly, just so, so many of the most impressive claims for placebo effects evaporate

on contact with scrutiny at all. You might have heard that the color of the pill determines what kind of placebo effect you might get. That was based on a lecturer in 1972, giving two different colored sugar pills to his students during a lecture, along with a list of 24 potential side effects, and then having them write down which from that list they experienced. So it wasn't blinded at all. The lecture knew what he was doing. The students were completely primed on what to experience. And even then, only two of the 24 side effects had data that was statistically significant. And if you control for the fact that this study therefore had 24 bites at the cherry to find something significant,

that effect disappears completely. Now, you may have heard people say placebo surgery works just as well as real surgery. And that sounds really impressive until you think about it for even a lived. Because people cite a study on knee surgery in particular, comparing surgery for osteoarthritis, without outcomes of patients whose knee was opened up and then stitched back together with no surgery taking place. And that study found that the patients who received no surgery performed just as well as the ones who had surgery, which means that type of surgery doesn't work. That is literally the whole point of checking it against the placebo.

But try and tell that to the placebo research is looking at the study. So we pretended to do surgery on your knee and we are sorry. But we painted your knee red and now it works a lot better. How's that? Okay, here's what I learned now. If you have a really bad doctor and here we are in the United fucking States where that happens. If you've got a really bad doctor, you just have your friend secretly tell that doctor to just like, you know, mime cutting in there and then sew it back up. Like, that'd better.

Also, how did they get people to agree to, like, the control part of that thing where it's like, yeah, we're going to just cut your knee open and do nothing and then sew back up. Yeah. I'm also a little disturbed that there's no follow-up to knee surgery, does it work? I need a little more. Well, that's a particular thing. Have you been talking to Tom? So when we published that Mike did a piece of this on Skeptych of the K, and we got lots of

people who are knee surgeons getting in touch going, yeah, we don't do that surgery. or it's shit, it doesn't work. That's literally what we learned for that. We do other stuff instead. That one doesn't work for that specific thing. I love that for a while, they were doing that surgery. I was going to say,

after knee surgeons, we don't do that anymore, not the flex you to think. Oh, no, we stopped as soon as we figured out that the surgery we were doing. Well, then there's the study in patients who had painful bone spurs on the shoulder

and that compared patients who had those spurs surgically removed to ones who just had sham surgery where they're opened up and they don't have it removed, and they compared those with people who had no treatment at all. And researchers found that the real and the sham surgery both did better than no treatment at all, which surely proves sham surgery works. Except again, no, because if you read the paper, you'll see that the patients of the real surgery and the fake surgery both got post-operative physiotherapy, which the no-treatment arm didn't get. So this study

actually discovered the amazing finding. that physiotherapy works sometimes for some things. Okay, what this essay makes me want to do is the lying parts, but not the future mark checks my work parts. Can I sign up for that? I feel like I could do lying buddies. I think it's perfect. We have a perfect system.

We should do lying buddy. We're already doing it, I think. All you have to do is put March in the Epstein files, and then it'll silence him. That'll work perfect. They'll all know. I'll just say nothing at that point. Yeah.

Okay, I mentioned that study on placebo aspirin inhalers, And that found that those inhalers, those fake inhalers, they work just as good as real inhalers and better than no inhaler at all. As long as, you're only asking people how they think their symptoms are. Now, on a scale of 1 to 10, how bad are your symptoms? If you actually measure anything at all, like lung capacity or the ability to do exercise, the placebo inhalers are identical to no treatment at all, which should be uncontroversial because they are literally not a treatment. It even goes beyond medical intervention. One study took 84 hotel cleaners and told half of them that doing cleaning work

counted as really good exercise for weight loss. And then a month later, that half had lost weight, even though they hadn't worked any harder. So the placebo effect causes magical weight loss. That's actually the study that Ben Goldiecker was writing about when he invited people to offer a better explanation. But if you read the paper, you'll see that researchers judged how. hard the cleaners were working by just asking their bosses if they'd noticed anyone working extra hard and the boss said no. So either making someone believe they're doing good exercise will magically make them

lose weight or people who think they're doing good exercise will actually do a bit more hard work but their bosses won't bother to notice how hard they're working. Okay, so yeah, the cleaners, they keep picking up like two vacuum hoses and like moving them up and down real fast. I think they like the snakey shape? I don't know. It doesn't really help clean anything. They're not working harder, as what I'm saying. But their tries look fantastic.

And presented with all of this, people will often point to their ace in the hole. Studies showing that placebos work, even when you tell people it's just a placebo. And that is true. There are studies that show that open label placebores are just as effective as normal placebals. There are even entire businesses built on openly selling people a placebo based on this kind of study. But again, it does not survive contact with scrutiny at all.

Okay, because doing real science is hard, March. Okay, you just get to sit there and check and nobody said you were going to check. I was just trying of, I just wanted some funding and I was tired. It's great. The guy who runs that business keeps emailing Mike to say, what about this? And Mike's like,

here's what's wrong with it. He goes, okay, I'll come back to you later. It's really good. Yeah, because that's his job. He's never going to change. Exactly. Okay, I guess I'll close my stalker's the guy in the cheap suit, said it's safe. No, I have to do this. I have to keep doing this. Stop. Those studies about open label placables and lots of other studies, too, they were conducted by Professor Ted Kapchuk, who's the head of placebo research at Harvard Medical School.

And when you read that study, he does indeed tell people they're just getting a placebo before then telling them, that's because plasibos are actually incredibly powerful, and you know, they can do all manner of things, and people do find them incredibly useful. And basically, you'll probably find them incredibly useful too, which A, is obviously not blinded, and B, is very obviously priming people with all of the exact kind of biases that placebo arms were designed to control for in the first place. Yeah, okay, but Marsh, the magic spell doesn't work if you don't say it out loud. I mean, that's how that is.

I mean, that is true, but that's because it doesn't work regardless. So, yeah, you can say that out loud and it still doesn't work. Yeah, true. And in the spirit of placebo treatments, looking like medical treatments while containing none of the science, I do just want to highlight that Professor Ted Kapchuk, by some margin the world's most prolific researcher into the placebo effect by this point, is one of the only Harvard professors of medicine not to have a medical background or qualification or a science background. Wait, how's that? What he does have is a BA in East Asian studies, and he claims he's got a degree from the Mackey's,

Institute in traditional Chinese medicine. He's got pictures of somebody at Harvard. That's what he really had. Yeah. Professor Ted Kapchuk first got interested in placebo research when he was running a herbal and acupuncture clinic in Boston in the late 70s and he was getting confused as to why some of his patients sometimes seemed like they were getting better before he actually gave them any of his acupuncture or herbal treatment.

That's his origin story. Incidentally, he's also the same Ted Kepchuk that you can find in it. numerous emails with one Jeffrey Epstein. Because Jeffrey Epstein was extremely interested in placebo research. He actually funded a large number of studies over the years. And I know that might sound like I'm introducing a source of bias that renders it incredibly difficult to do any kind of reasonable and objective analysis here. But to that, I'd say, hey, welcome to the world of placebo studies.

And if you had to summarize what you've learned in one sentence, what would it be? you can end any essay on a moral high ground once you point out how much of someone's work was funded by a prolific sexophon. I nailed it. Got some bad news about your association with me. Are you ready for the quiz? Only if I get to compare all the wrong answers to the questions afterwards to see if I can spot a magical pattern. Okay, Marsh, question if, as you're claiming, the placebo effect doesn't really work. Why is that probably true?

A, this episode heard by millions fucks up the whole thing because you have to let people believe the fake thing is real before it becomes real and you fucked it up. Or is it B, all of the above? That is a level of rigor entirely befitting placebo research, Steve. I'm going to go with C, none of the above. You got it right. Okay, Marsh, no discussion of ineffective medication

would be complete without talking about Joe Rogan. which vaccine is effective in Joe's opinion. A, polio, B, MMR, C, COVID, D, Tennis, or E, the woke mind virus. Oh, God. The incredibly sad and very true answer is the only one of those he thinks works is the vaccine against the work mine virus. Which is Twitter, everybody. Wait, is he actually against all of those things? He doesn't think any of them work. Doesn't think they work. Or there's always a really harmful. What does he think happened to polio?

We washed better. We cleaned up. Oh, we're just, we're just, we're just battering, cleaning things. Also, genuinely, that FDR probably didn't have polio, so it's fine. He probably didn't have polio. He probably had, I think it was like Epstein-Olo. No, Guillain Barre. But that doesn't mean that all the other people had polio didn't have polio.

So like, you vanish to knock down that one. Come on. Yeah. There's always, you could just add a lie. It sucks bullshit. You can just add a lie and then you can get out of the thing before and people follow you down that stupid web of lies. Do you think he shits on FDR and the hopes that his family with the three-letter names will be more famous? Do you think there's like a big grudge match in the three-letter names family about like, nah, fuck FDR.

We had the best one. All right. Our guy was faking not having a thing. He was wearing a weird back brace brawl. March. So I got shot in the head weird. You're wrong. Placebos work and they are magic.

A, this episode is sponsored by AG1. How dare you? B, and momentum health. C, we will take your money. We'll take it. Give us your money. You're fat. I'm going to have to go to secret answer D.

Eli runs all of those ads past me. And I say, no, you're not allowed to take them. And he's so sad every single time. We have a backup check system where, like, me and now have to be like, did you do you talk? all you I know again because he's claiming he didn't know

saying you said yes oh Marsh loves this one he said that this CBD this CBD is the real one really this is the first time he's ever been behind with it I'm just gonna make a quick call no don't call him he's busy

and all I could do is to say whether the science makes sense I can't then say what they're doing is bullshit it's not scientifically wrong but you know it's probably still bullshit I could give you a view on the science that's all the rest of

Best is your business, guys. It's up to you. We're giving away dozens of dollars. So much money. All right. Tom, you win. Sure. Cecil, you should do some right. All right. Sounds good. All right. Well, for Marsh, Heath.

You got it. And Cecil. I mean, my mistake for hanging out with this today. We'll be back next week. And by then, Cecil, will be an expert on something else. Between now and then, you can listen to Marsh on the No Rogan experience. Or you could go listen to the skeptics with a K episode where Marsh steals out the real dirt on

fucking passibos. That was a while back, but you can find it. I mean, there's like 20 episodes where Mike goes into great detail. There's a whole back catalog. It's worth it. Yeah. And if you'd like to help keep this show going, you can make a per episode donation at patreon.com slash citation pod or leave a five-star review everywhere you can.

And if you'd like to get in touch with us, check out past episodes. Connect with us on social media or check the show notes. Be sure to check out citationpod.com.