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Amy: Of course I do. There have been many studies proving its validity. Sheldon: Great. Now, this may look like a Tic Tac, but it is really a powerful medication specifically designed to cure your illness as well as freshen your breath. -- The Big Bang Theory The placebo effect is where a patient thinks that a 'medicine' is healing them, even though it doesn't have an actual medical effect. The most common use is in drug trials, in which a control group is given a placebo, to compare the effects in case the drug actually is only effective due to the placebo effect, or is even worse. One difference between fiction and reality is that, unlike in fiction, real placebos often continue to have an effect even if the user finds out it's a placebo - the action of taking the "drug" is usually enough to fool the body. The opposite is the nocebo effect, in which someone believes something is hurting them or making them sick, when it's really not. This could even kill them, as Your Mind Makes It Real. See Magic Feather in terms of the plot. A more realistic version of Clap Your Hands If You Believe. __________________________________________________________________ Examples: open/close all folders Anime and Manga * One chapter of Sayonara, Zetsubou-Sensei has a field day with this trope, including Nozomu taking a placebo drug and breaking out in hives from the percieved side effects, Stalker with a Crush Matoi forcing Nozomu to take a fake Love Pill, only for the effect to work on her instead when she's the only one convinced that it worked, and Nozomu eventually getting fake surgery performed on him to get rid of the fake side effects from the fake drug he took at the start, and ending up convinced that he's been turned into an android. + The chapter also throws some Leaning on the Fourth Wall into the mix, by introducing a sticker that, if you stick it to a manga, makes it six times funnier. Immediately the sticker starts showing up more and more, until the last two pages are covered in them. Film * In Eurotrip, two of the characters order brownies at an Amsterdam bakery run by a Dreadlock Rasta. They immediately become stoned beyond belief...until the Dreadlock Rasta calmly informs them that they're not hash brownies. * The protagonist of Matchstick Men, who has severe OCD, is given a packet of pills by his psychiatrist that apparently heals him. Around the same time, he starts bonding with his long-lost daughter. He eventually learns that the pills are just soy menopause supplements, and that bonding with his daughter has given his life meaning and helped him overcome his neurosis. * The Birdcage: Armand's "Pirin tablets" -- he seems to think they're some kind of powerful anti-anxiety medication; they are in fact Aspirin with two letters scraped off. They seem to do the job, though. * In SpaceJam, the Tune Squad has completely given up hope of winning their basketball game against the Monstars until Bugs Bunny gives them 'Michael's Secret Stuff', which buffs them up and gives them the confidence to get back in the game. Of course, the real secret is that it is just water. * Subverted in The Exorcist. In one scene, a priest douses the demon-posessed protagonist with tap water and claims that it's holy water, but the protagonist screams in pain anyway. Later, though, it's implied that the demon only pretended to be fooled so that the priests would think that the "possession" was purely psychological and wouldn't try to exorcise it. When the priests douse the protagonist with real holy water in the climactic exorcism scene, the screams are real and the water leaves visible burns. * An inadvertent psychotherapy version appears in What About Bob?: Bob's new therapist gives him a copy of his book Baby Steps, which is about setting small, attainable goals. Bob completely misses the point and thinks that he has to physically take small steps wherever he goes. However, Bob's focus on taking "baby steps" when he gets nervous helps distract him from his fears and allows him to do things he wasn't able to do before. Literature * In It, it is revealed that Eddie Kaspbrak's asthma is psychosomatic, and his medication is a placebo. * Inverted by Captain Underpants, who thinks his powers are neutralized if he's sprayed with spray starch. Live Action TV * Star Trek: The Original Series At the end of Mudd's Women. * The Red Green Show had an episode where the lodge members were part of a test-market for an energy bar, making them very active and becoming addicted. When the test batch ran out, they reverted back to normal, only for Harold to reveal all they got was a basic granola bar to gauge product interest, due to the real stuff being too dangerous. Red, taking this as proof of the strength of his mind, salvages one of the test sample bars and tells his wife at home to wait up that night. * In an episode of Frasier, Niles eats a normal brownie thinking it's a pot brownie, with the reverse situation for Martin. Hilarity Ensues. * One time on Mash they run out of morphine so they give the patients sugar pills telling them it's a strong painkiller. It works. + On the B-plot of that episode, they're experiencing a heat wave that has everyone miserable. They give Klinger some of the sugar pills claiming they're some sort of new drug that will allow him to feel cooler. He spends the rest of the episode in his regular uniform while everyone else is wearing undershirts. * The Suite Life on Deck: Bailey uses a placebo to raise London's intelligence. Subverted in that after realizing that it's a placebo, London returns to normal. Then she takes another placebo. * On The Big Bang Theory, Raj is unable to talk to women unless he's drunk. In "The Terminator Decoupling," the guys are on a train when they discover that Summer Glau is in the same car, and they all try to hit on her. Raj drinks copious amounts of beer before going over to talk with her, and she actually seems to like him. Then Howard walks over and informs him that it was non-alcoholic beer. He clams up and walks away without another word. * Referred to when the MythBusters tested seasickness cures. To be certain that Adam and Grant weren't subconsciously skewing the test results, Jamie gave each of them an "over-the-counter medicine" that was actually a vitamin pill. (Grant fell for the placebo, but Adam got sick just as fast as in the other tests.) * In The Next Mutation, the Turtles have a recurring team of foes that once used a magic formula to enhance their abilities. The effect ended when the turtles pointed out the 'magic' was just a placebo. * Used when NewsRadio parodied Flowers for Algernon. Joe makes Matthew a "Smart Drink", which works until Matthew gets smart enough to realise it's only working because he thinks it will. Matthew: It's like when Wile E Coyote runs off a cliff. He can stay standing in mid-air until he looks down. * Penn And Tellers Bullshit episode "Yoga, Tantric Sex, Etc." featured a man trying to explain why herbs work for some people and not for others. Penn summed up the entire argument in one sentence. Penn: If you believe they work they work, if you don't they don't. You hardly ever hear that about penicillin. Western Animation * Dogbert has a placebo that works even when the user knows it's a placebo. + That, and the people he's giving them to are usually too stupid to realize what a placebo is. * The Simpsons: The Crazy Cat Lady once regained her sanity thanks to a medication but lost it when she learned it was a placebo. * In the Handy Manny segment "Fearless Rusty", Lovable Coward Rusty is sprinkled with "magic dust" by a local magician, who claimed it would make him brave... and he believes it. * In one episode of Hey Arnold!, Helga bought an anti-love potion that successfully killed her feelings for Arnold only to learn later on that it was just grape juice. Real Life * Chiropractic adjustments are controversial, owing to the fact that there's little scientific proof that the person doing an adjustment (technically a Doctor of Chiropractic, since they aren't actually medical doctors) is doing anything other than basic decompression of the spine. But because these 'doctors' are very good at convincing people they'll feel better, they do tend to feel better. * Acupuncture also has very little proof that it is effective (yes, they are able to do studies with needles that look like they are inserted, but actually are not), but people really believe that it helps them. * Therapeutic Touch therapy and it's "Eastern" equivalent, reiki, worked through this effect as well - it's so easily debunked that a 9-year old girl was able to do it, as seen here [external_link.gif] . * Homeopathy may fool many people due to the placebo effect, despite the fact that it would have to utterly violate some of the most basic laws of physics and chemistry in order to work. * Iridology. [external_link.gif] In the words of The Other Wiki: Iris texture is a phenotypical feature which develops during gestation and remains unchanged after birth. * Pretty much all pseudoscientific "treatments" depend on this. They are mostly (not entirely, but mostly) directed toward the relief of (chronic) pain, which is one of the most incredibly subjective things on the planet to attempt to measure. * Guess why the pharmaceutical industry spends more money on advertising than research. [external_link.gif] __________________________________________________________________ Pitch Generator More Like a Footnote than Anything Else Raekuul Dump new edits workshops edit page random TV Tropes by TV Tropes Foundation, LLC is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available from thestaff@tvtropes.org. Privacy Policy 19956 5