How do you define placebo? Isn’t it just intention, whether that’s the unconscious intention of the sick person to heal or of the plant with its vibration or of another person that the sick person gives their unconscious permission to be influenced by? Does this mean you don’t believe in any sort of healing that can’t now be understood by science?

Chris Kresser: No, it definitely doesn’t mean that. At the same time, I think there’s plenty of good research on placebo effects that provides insight into what’s actually happening. Intention is certainly one word that could be used. Dan Moerman, who I really like, has proposed the term “the meaning effect” because it’s been argued that a lot of the effects that we observe from placebo involve the meaning that we attach to that particular intervention. There are a lot of examples about this that are really fascinating, and it’s a topic I love to discuss, but given that I did that for an hour with Jo Marchant and that podcast is coming out really shortly, I’m going to refer you to that so I can answer a few more questions. I think you’ll find that we probably agree, Justine. I think the placebo effect points toward a level of healing or a type of healing that gets short shrift in conventional medicine and even in functional medicine currently, the way that it’s thought about.

I’m personally very excited about how I can apply placebo effect as a clinician and also as a parent. One small example is if you have to give your child some medicine, whether that’s a botanical medicine or a pharmaceutical or a supplement or whatever, if you explain to them what you’re doing and that, “This is really going to help you. It’s going to make you feel so much better. I know you’re going to wake up tomorrow feeling way better,” we have research that shows that that can substantially affect the efficacy of that treatment or intervention, whatever it is that you’re doing. You can harness that as a clinician and as a parent.

It also leads to some pretty interesting questions, like I talked to Jo about, regarding informed consent because we know that the nocebo effect is also very powerful. If you tell patients that they might experience certain side effects from a medication, the chances that they’ll experience those side effects go up dramatically, and we have a lot of proof of this in studies, so it leads to the question of what is ethical in terms of informed consent. Should we be rattling off the list of all potential side effects when we know that doing that actually increases the likelihood that they’ll experience them? Interesting question. Make sure to listen to that podcast if you’re drawn to this topic because it can be really fascinating.