[nico]

Really hope at some point the healthcare industry starts trying to figure out how to harness the power of the placebo effect to enhance healing, rather than trying to do away with it

I mean, is the goal healing people? Or is it to only heal them if they get better by the direct effect of a (patentable/sellable) chemical? Whose interests is the healthcare industry serving or protecting?

[tsimionescu]

You are conflating two things: medical research and the practice of medicine. During the normal practice of medicine, most doctors do everything they can to harness the power of the placebo effect: they reassure the patient, they speak calmly and warmly, they encourage religious people to pray, etc. Doctors care about a positive outcome, and will take any help they can get to achieve it.

In medical research, we are interested in figuring out if a particular drug helps for a particular condition. We already know that for some conditions, even giving patients a drink of water helps a bit. We need to understand if the drug is better than that, or if it only appears to help. The placebo effect is a baseline of noise in this case, and we need some way to filter it out to understand if there is some signal from the drug itself. If not, then you might as well give the patients some water rather than waste their money on an expensive hard to reproduce potentially poisonous substance.

[lukas099]

Pretty much every intervention that a doctor prescribes does "harness the power of the placebo effect". It just also is effective beyond that effect.

[eviks]

There is nothing to harness, it's just noise. But also homeopathy exist, so the broader healthcare industry is happy to feed anyone gullible enough with sugar pills to harness this power

[aredox]

Oh, it's already done, it's called homeopathy. And it's a striving business, don't worry, the patients'needs are ignored just as much.