peopleThis may seem silly - but, do placeboes, in general, have the same kind of effect on Atheists as they do on Theists?
That is, in medical trials, with proper double-blind setups, is there a difference in how placebos affect Atheists? Has anyone done research on this?
Placebo is a rather broad term, in regards to how it's being used; that is, are you referring to medically, as in, this is a double-blind, randomized controlled trial? are you referring to alt-med practices, such as homeopathy?
Either way, though, it can. Whether or not a person is an atheist has nothing to do with whether or not they're skeptical, as I learned in Is atheism = skepticism?. If a person, regardless of their religious or lack of religious beliefs, is still prone to believing in other questionable treatments or therapies, the placebo effect is likely to work, and their chiropractic/acupuncture/homeopathy/etc. will seem to produce an effect.
It's unfortunate that this question already has an answer since there is an even more interesting piece of information out there: Placebos can work even without deceiving the patient into believing they have taken a drug(the article).
So yes, they work on atheists and skeptics and everyone, since, strangely enough, they just seem to work regardless of their epistemic/belief status.
I once read that placebos work on just about everybody - there’s no special profile of a placebo-prone or placebo-proof person.
Yes they do. I know a few Atheists who fall for wearing Power Balance Bands. An Atheist may never have had a skeptical thought in their life and a skeptic can believe in God.
Of course it can. Instead of recycling what others rightly wrote already, I will quote a paragraph from Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion (ch. 5 - The roots of religion, p. 167):
Part of what a doctor can give a patient is consolation and reassurance. This is not to be dismissed out of hand. My doctor doesn’t literally practise faith-healing by laying on of hands. But many’s the time I’ve been instantly ‘cured’ of some minor ailment by a reassuring voice from an intelligent face surmounting a stethoscope. The placebo effect is well documented and not even very mysterious. Dummy pills, with no pharmacological activity at all, demonstrably improve health. That is why double-blind drug trials must use placebos as controls. It’s why homoeopathic remedies appear to work, even though they are so dilute that they have the same amount of active ingredient as the placebo control - zero molecules. Incidentally, an unfortunate by-product of the encroachment by lawyers on doctors’ territory is that doctors are now afraid to prescribe placebos in normal practice. Or bureaucracy may oblige them to identify the placebo in written notes to which the patient has access, which of course defeats the object. Homoeopaths may be achieving relative success because they, unlike orthodox practitioners, are still allowed to administer placebos - under another name. They also have more time to devote to talking and simply being kind to the patient. In the early part of its long history, moreover, homoeopathy’s reputation was inadvertently enhanced by the fact that its remedies did nothing at all - by contrast with orthodox medical practices, such as bloodletting, which did active harm.
Of course they do! If I thought a sugar pill would alleviate a condition I was suffering from, placebo effects are bound to be apparent.
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