[vidarh]

A placebo often helps substantially. That is why we tend to test with a placebo rather than nothing at all, in order to measure the effect of what we want to test rather than the ability of our mind to influence our body.

And the effect is not merely psychological. Often placebo produces measurable responses.

[return0]

Still though, the idea behind placebos is that they 're the most convenient thing to do compared to the alternative. It doesn't justify the suggestion to "meditate to increase T" more than "take a sugar pill to increase T"

[vidarh]

The idea of placebos is to attempt to introduce a "noise floor" of sorts that lets you get an idea for how much of the measured effect is actually caused by what is being measured.

Generally you want a placebo that makes the test subject unable to tell which is the placebo. That will not be the case with just handing people a sugar pill and being honest about what it is. To have an effect of a sugar pill in such a setting you would have to tell people there is a chance the pill is some form of medication intended to produce similar effects.

The problem with that is that if the effects of meditation are just placebo, what you end up measuring is the strength of peoples beliefs about the efficacy of meditation vs. the efficacy of drugs - you're not comparing like with like, and can't rule out additive effects of combining the two (whether or not they're both caused by the placebo effect) either.

And even if it is all placebo, that does not mean it may not be justified to suggest to meditate. In fact, it is a long standing debate of medical ethics whether - and if so when - it might sometimes be justified to utilize placebos as medical treatment, because it can often have real, measurable physical effects on peoples health.

The issue with that is that you'd be lying to a patient, and it might undermine peoples trust in the medical profession. That is not an issue with an off the cuff suggestion to people to meditate from someone not claiming to be a doctor.

Also, I haven't seen anyone here suggest meditating to increase T, but giving an off the cuff remark suggesting meditating to address "psychological worries" people might have 10-20% of the time. Serious psychological issues needs professional treatment, but I took his comment, given the context, the term "worries", and the implication they'd only be there 10-20% of the time to mean general stress and light performance anxieties, in which case meditation either works for you or it doesn't.

If it does, it does not matter if it works because of the placebo effect or not. If it doesn't, then no harm done and you can consider TRT.

The point of his comment seemed to be that most people do not need TRT, but fall in the normal range and should consider other factors first. I'm saying that as someone who will seriously consider TRT when I'm older (I'm turning 40 this year)