Bette

“So she wasn’t lying, per se. She was being honest when she said she believed they could be cured. It just wasn’t the pill that cured them. What cured them, in the end, was belief. Belief in the full context of the encounter: the pills they assumed would make them feel better, this partly due to a lifetime’s experience of taking pills that made them feel better; pills of a certain weight (five hundred milligrams) that felt appropriately substantial; pills of a certain color (bright red) that looked therapeutic; pills that were in capsule form (which people believed were more powerful than tablets); pills that were stored in a refrigerator (which people believed were more powerful than room-temperature pills on a shelf); pills prescribed by a medical (seeming) professional, in an office with an exterior sign and interior layout designed to be maximally reassuring—all of these factors meeting the patient’s own strong desire to heal, which produced, finally, a confidence that they would be healed, a kind of confirmation bias that was the true and only source of this medicine. It was its single active ingredient: belief. Her patients were cured because, simply, they believed in the cure.”
― Nathan Hill, Wellness