arachnophilia writes:
personally, and this is purely anecdotal of course, i find that many things that work entirely off the placebo reaction have little or no effect on me.
I think people vary widely as to how suggestible they are. You sound somewhat like me. Every once in a while at work I accidentally get decaf instead of regular coffee, and within 15 minutes I know I made a mistake. A long time ago when I traveled regularly between college and home I would buy cokes every now and then to keep me awake. One time I could only get a Ho-Jo cola, and 15 minutes later when nothing was happening I pulled over to read the ingredients and discovered that it had no caffeine. I used to think headache pills were headache pills and didn't care what brand I pulled out of the cabinet, and it took some years before I realized that when the headache didn't go away that it was Tylenol I'd taken, which apparently has no effect on me (I used to think this was really weird, but when I finally did mention it to my doctor he said that it wasn't really that uncommon).
So I feel like I have enough evidence to conclude that I know when something is having an effect on me and when it isn't, but now with my failure to find any medicine that works for my stamina condition I'm beginning to wonder if my pessimism that something will eventually work is preventing me from detecting when something does have some positive effect.
I think it would be possible to study the reverse placebo effect. For example, two groups would both be given headache pills, but one would be told they were headache pills, and the other would be told they were placebos and be provided some reasonable-sounding explanation (but not the real one) for why they were telling them they were giving them placebos.
Someone mentioned the difficulty in studying effects on stamina, and I agree. Stamina is affected by many factors, including how much sleep you've had, how much you've eaten, what you've eaten, what time of day you exercise, how long since the last exercise, etc. Sometimes I just have wonderful days stamina-wise, but I can never find anything to point to. I've been great with a lot of sleep and no sleep, in the morning and at night, after days of rest and with only one day of rest. The only thing that is clearly a factor is dieting. The specific foods I eat don't seem to make much difference, but any decrease in caloric intake such as occurs on a diet dramatically affects my stamina.
--Percy