Placebos work. Why?

I’m about to burst. Guests: Laryngologist Dr. Robert Bastian and Noel King, co-host and editorial director of the Vox daily news podcast Today, Explained For more, go to http://vox.com/unexplainable It’s a great place to sign up for our newsletter, view show transcripts, and read ...  Show more

Astronomers are putting together a new picture of the early universe. It involves a lot of very weird black holes, and it could help us understand how our own galaxy formed. Guest: Caitlin Casey, astronomer at UC Santa Barbara ⁠ For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠v ...  Show more

Should your doctor prescribe a placebo for you, instead of conventional medicine? And if she did, would it work? Is the double-blind placebo-controlled paradigm really the gold standard for medical research? Placebos are the most widely used treatments in the history of medicine. ...  Show more

The placebo effect is a phenomenon in which a person's symptoms or well-being improve after receiving a fake treatment that has no specific or intrinsic effect on their condition. For example, a person may feel less pain after taking a sugar pill that they believe is a painkille ...  Show more

Scientists don’t understand why so many people suffer from Covid-19 symptoms for months, well after they stop testing positive. But that’s just the start of the mystery. There are other diseases that cast these long shadows, and they point to a major blind spot in medicine. For m ...  Show more

The placebo effect is pretty freaky when you think about it: just believing that a harmless substance is a medicine can really produce measurable benefits. It sounds crazy, but the placebo effect is real, and its implications continue to fascinate scientists. So why does it ap ...