Placebo

Here’s fun.

You know the placebo effect? Give some people sugar pills and they get better all on their own. But there are a bunch of people for whom this does not work, and they need the actual bona fide drugs to get better.

Now here’s the neat bit: if you take this second group of people, it turns out that you can feed them drugs for a while, and then move them onto the placebo a bit later on, and it will keep on working.

I like this idea. Unfortunately it rather adds weight to the Christian Science argument about how we never need to go to doctors because if we look hard enough within ourselves we hold the cure.