this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2024
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Crystals maybe help in the same way placebos do. That's the most I would admit about such stuff.
Where it gets dangerous, is giving up actual real working medication in place of a placebo.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/article/2024/jul/02/woman-died-slapping-therapy-healer-sent-by-god-court-told
slapping...
therapy...
I agree. Placebos can help too.
Fact is, for it to work as a placebo, you need to believe it will work.
I've had a few coworkers who had stuff like crystals on their desk because their partner believed in it. I understand why that stuff happens, the believer who (supposedly) cares about your well-being, gets benefit from it, and wants you to have the same or similar benefits from the same. But since they're doing it to placate their partner and don't personally believe, it's just a rock on their desk.
What's even wilder is you don't have to consciously believe it, you can unconsciously believe it and it will still work! Doctors will routinely prescribe placebos and be very open about the fact that it's just a placebo, that there is no chemical compound in the medication.
And yet, the act of taking a pill from a bottle seems to trigger something. Recent research has actually identified part of this mechanism in rat brains. There really is a part of the brain that can be tricked into releasing a set of chemicals that relieve pain, reduce inflammation and create better moods. Someday we might have a placebo pill that actually has medication in it. Wildly convoluted how the brain works.
Placebos is measurement error, not effectiveness. People that believe something works are more likely to report improvements when taking that medication irrespective of its effectiveness. Placebo effect is just misreporting, noise or unaccounted phenomena. It’s literally how we define something doesn’t work.
And its been proven that placebos work.
So as long as you define life changing energy as a subtle psychological buff…
Allowing the crystal myths to continue only leads to more harmful behavior down the road. Sure, it can work as a placebo, but so can other things that don't tend to leave someone trusting unproven methods in lieu of proven ones.
Placebos don’t work. It’s a common misconception. Placebo effect is the error in measuring not any actual effect. It’s literally the barrier we use to define effective and non effective.
Anyone claiming they have something that provides a placebo effect to help is fraudulent or ignorant.
In the UK it is illegal to proscribe placebos. Because they don’t work.