Why Is the Placebo Effect So Rarely Studied?

The Power of Belief in Healing Processes

I thoroughly enjoyed this post by Dr. Toby Rogers this morning, which I think largely summed up an entire field of problems in medicine:

How anti-corporate agnotology studies got swamped by pro-corporate misinformation studies

As Toby Rogers writes:

In the late 1990s and early 2000s there was a burgeoning field in the social sciences dedicated to the study of ignorance. Linguist Iain Boal coined the term “agnotology” (from the Greek ἄgnosis, “not knowing” + logía, “the study of”) to describe the field and it was popularized by Stanford medical historian Robert Proctor.

The premise of agnotology is both simple and profound. Most people think of ignorance as the absence of knowledge. Proctor and others in the field argue the opposite — that ignorance is socially constructed in the same way that knowledge is. Powerful interests instruct society to pay attention to some things and not others through a variety of inducements (you get paid to study certain topics and not others) and punishments (you will be blacklisted if you ask too many questions about forbidden topics). Over time these values become invisible and just a part of culture.

This is always summarized best to me by this simple quote from Upton Sinclair:

I am well aware of conceptual frameworks that allow certain things to be studied and disallow other things to be studied. There’s a lot of carrot and stick inducements, both said and unsaid, which go on throughout academia. I’d dare say many University types learn to patrol an electric fence constructed in their own mind, in much the same way that a battered spouse increasingly learns the rules that (s)he cannot break. The funding almost always supports corporate and vested interests. Increasingly this conflicts with real science which in my mind should be agnostic on outcome. Whether your hypothesis was supported refuted or there was no change from the control group to the treatment arm it is still valid to report it.

Studying the Placebo Effect: A Study in Top Down Narrative Control

Some years ago I wanted to study the placebo effect. I noticed and was fascinated that there was relatively little study in the space that I could find. Yet young children certainly respond to medicine better if you say it will make them feel better, regardless of its composition. People are also more likely to respond to a placebo if it has a higher cost for example.

It’s one of those things that they intentionally mostly ignore. Oddly I read an interesting thing on substack regarding how placebos work even if the person taking it KNOWS it is a placebo but I am unable to pull up the link anywhere. If anybody reading this can find it, please link it in the comments. The body can heal itself, but that wouldn’t sell any drugs or treatments now would it?

What’s even more remarkable is how even if the placebo effect had no effect whatsoever, which is not true, simply shifting the window of statistical analysis out, say with Covid shots to two weeks 2 shots post vaccination, will lead to positive results.

A Highly Effective Placebo

What if the jabs caused Covid? Well actually then the statistical effect would be even stronger in favor of the vaccines! As Joel Smalley notes:

Now imagine, if you will, that the “vaccine” actually accelerated the infections and deaths in the vaccinated so that those who ordinarily might have died after two weeks, got infected and died in the first two weeks and were then shifted into the unvaccinated category, thereby increasing the unvaccinated fatality rate further and reducing the vaccinated rate after the two-week window when the metric is calculated. The worse the vaccine is, the better the vaccine efficacy becomes using the methodology adopted worldwide by public health authorities according to the standard set by Big Pharma.

The last few years have been a great measure of incentive and repressive structures and collective ignorance. The list of the ways that the “safe and effective” narrative studies were lies is actually quite long. Some was outright falsifying data, some was excluding trial participants with bad reactions or undermining what their bad reaction was. Some involved very sophisticated big worded sciency mumbo jumbo where, cleverly buried in the methods section, one could find that the parameters were intentionally set up to make the jabs look good. Then those studies got cited endlessly in the astroturf war and by factcheckers even as excess mortality remains high healthy people are dying suddenly at unprecedented rates, many struggle with persistent health problems and birth rates have dropped even further. But look at all the money made by big pharma and we saved millions of lives that could have been lost to Covid. Shine the streetlight over there.

Toby Rogers writes his summary of how we occupy such collective inability to see things:

And then in the 2010s a curious thing happened. A giant object passed in front of the sun. Few people talk or write about agnotology anymore, in spite of its abundant utility. Instead, thousands of universities now have professorships and staff positions dedicated to “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” studies. And it seems that every day another unemployed PR hack starts an astroturf “think tank” dedicated to studying “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” — and they are all effortlessly flush with cash.

“Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” studies occupy the intellectual space formerly held by those who study agnotology — but the content of their work is the exact opposite of agnotology studies. “Misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” studies are thoroughly corporate. Their goal is to declare anything that contradicts the mainstream corporate narrative as officially off limits and then for good measure these fake scholars launch witch hunts to blacklist critical thinkers on behalf of the various cartels that fund them.

Ironically, “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” studies are exactly the sort of weaponized corporate ignorance that agnotology studies warned us about — now on a global scale.

It does not take a lot of imagination to figure out how this happened. These fake university departments and fake think tanks are often cagey about their donors but somehow the money just rolls in. There are conferences, books, associations, and these hacks can easily get published in corporate-controlled journals and get softball interviews on corporate TV and radio. I’m sure if we traced the money trail all the way back to the source we would find the usual villains — the predatory billionaires who want to enslave the world (mainly Gates and Soros), the robber baron foundations, pharmaceutical companies, and others toxic industries (Big Food, Big Ag, Big Chem, and Big Wireless) footing the bill. (Let’s crowdsource this: if you have links that show the money trail please post them in the comments.)

I bring all of this up not just to hate on “misinformation, disinformation, and malinformation” studies. The entire industry is indeed vile and fascist and the privatized heir of the SS, Stasi, and KGB. Everyone who works in that field should be ashamed of themselves and history will judge them as antihuman trash.

But the main reason I bring this up is because of what it tells us about the American economy and the economy of the developed world.

I am fascinated by the way that the base (the economic mode of production of any era) determines the superstructure (the values of that society as embodied in art, religion, and law).

Right now a huge portion of the U.S. economy is based on junk science. Pharma is the most glaring example of this. The business model of Pharma is to cause harms via vaccines and then those harms are paid for by citizens (out of their own pockets) and government. In 2020, RFK, Jr. estimated the revenue from vaccines at about $50 billion annually and the revenue from the products used to treat vaccine injuries (Epi pens, diabetes meds, Risperdal, etc.) was $500 billion annually. Covid shots likely double those numbers. If Pharma was forced to internalize (pay for) those “negative externalities” the industry would not exist.

So in order to continue generating profits, Pharma requires totalitarian levels of censorship and control of the population. Pharma cannot exist without liability protection to stay out of the courts and censorship to keep the public from waking up. Pharma also requires government, schools, teachers’ unions, and universities to sell the entire childhood population to the industry in order to keep the profits flowing. Totalitarianism is central to Pharma’s business model, it cannot survive without it.

What’s wild is to see the bougiecrats jumping like trout for the fly on Pharma’s hook. Every underemployed cultural and media studies major seems to jump at the chance to become a respected member of the new corporate Stasi. The money is great, and it beats working at Starbucks with a master’s or Ph.D. I’m sure the SS, Stasi, and KGB also paid better than the prevailing wage in the area at the time.

This dynamic — profitable junk science combined with waves and waves of bougie shock troops to protect it IS the American economy right now (and a huge portion of the European and Australian economy as well). And this perilous dynamic is an existential threat to the future of our country and the entire developed world. This is what we are fighting against. And if we are to survive, we absolutely must find a way to shift our economy to more productive purposes.

For the time being the more productive purposes would seem to be stopping the shots, seeking accountability for the grave injustices inflicted upon the world, holding the perpetrators accountable and making sure that nothing like this ever happens again. Of course getting people to acknowledge that loved ones might have been killed by these “vaccines” is many times an uphill battle. Some is that the light has been shone intentionally elsewhere (Covid! Long Covid! Delayed medical care! Hyseteria!). Some is because accepting that the jabs were related to a death often requires a threefold acknowledgment of emotions that are all very difficult: guilt on death if the person’s actions in any ways encouraged vaccination of the family member, acceptance of a great evil in the world that will require self responsibility and sacrifice to fight, and accepting the repercussions that bad health outcomes could also happen to that person. For the medical professionals complicity in this all but guarantees being abandoned by most of them if suffering from jab damage.

For those who are ready to take control of their health Mrs. Creed apparently translated a spike protein detox guide into Thai language. I am considering printing out some of these and leaving them around especially if I see the funeral of someone younger whose death was inexplicable at Wat Muang Mai.

"Don't worry, there are solutions!" Spike protein detox flyer (downloadable pdf in Thai and English)

To good health….believe you can.

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