But there's one other guy in the study who is equally screwed: He's the guy who gets the placebo (you pronounce that plah-CEE-bo and not, as I thought when I first read it in the sixth grade, PLACE-bow). I don't know who ever was the first person to notice that if a person thinks they're going to get better that sometimes they actually do get better.

 

((I was thinking about this this week when my doctor prescribed a certain pill for me. I won't say what kind of pill it was, but let's just say that it's a pill only a man would take, and its effects are potentially profound and life-changing. I have this one crazy doctor who was a medic in Viet Nam and if not for his lazy eye he would look just like Steve Buscemi, and he has a photgraphic memory, and sometimes I wonder if he's an alien.))

 

When I got the pill from my doctor this week I was looking at it and wondering how something that tiny could have such a huge effect on my whole body and thus on my whole life.

 

But then, I suppose weirder things have happened, like how one tiny little blood clot or one tiny little bullet could kill you, so I don't know why I have such a hard time believing that one little pill could make such a huge change. Yet, I never have believed in pills, and even things like Advil and Tylenol never work for me. It's kind of like a reverse placebo effect, how sometimes fake medicine can make you better if you believe in it, maybe sometimes actual medicine will have no effect if you don't.

 

Isn't that kind of how religion works?

 

Or like when little kids play make believe games, like superheroes or cowboys or spacemen, and then someone walks in on them, they're screaming at them stuff like "Don't go over there! That side of the driveway is lava!" or "Watch out! There's a monster behind that door!" and you're just kind of standing there, confused, blinking like Dora the Explorer when she's waiting for an answer. But they're so adamant about dangers that even they know aren't real, and holding everyone else to imaginary standards that they just made up five seconds ago.

 

Again, just like most religions.

 

My problem is that I would walk into a room with real lava and monsters, flip off the people who were trying to warn me, and step right into it.

 

And isn't all this kind of like how Democrats and Republicans disagree so fundamentally and so passionately on things that are so basic, and should be so easy to prove or disprove? You couldn't really say that one or the other is stupid, no matter what comics would have you believe, because they're all lawyers and doctors and CEOs and stuff.

 

No one ever disagrees or fights or kills each other about math. There's no group of math fanatics who believe that 5 x 5 = 30 and go around killing people who disagree.

 

I know politics is all subjective and opinion and, and math is rigid and scientific, but why is it that educated people can't agree whether or not raising taxes is good or bad for the economy?

 

In the end I guess we all have to choose what to believe and in a way, like with placeboes, how it's all going to affect us. And what you believe seems to affect what's real, and this has been documented scientifically.

 

And suddenly it just now occurs to me, doesn't the placebo effect prove that lying works, and lying is good? Just one more reason for religious fanatics to be pissed at scientists, I guess.