Placebo Effects are Sorcery

[Metamorph]

Hello, I would like to propose my totally peer-reviewed mechanism behind the placebo effect: Sorcery. You see, it seems to work with either the power of people's minds, or some kind of sympathetic substance, but no one really knows except of course me. Therefore, I propose the mechanism of voodoo magic as being the source of the active effect of placebos. If we magnetize some placebo pills and don't magnetize the other ones, they all work equally well, which seems to imply that the true cause of the placebo effect was old-school animal magnetism all along. I'm sure the psychology department will enjoy my hypothesis that the placebo effect works by the mystic arts. We could possibly even load up a placebo to have a stronger effect than another placebo, as with acupuncture, though I'm sure this would be firmly rejected by the mainstream establishment as being some form of arcane psionics, just like Alfred Wegener was infamously rejected as catastrophism and every crank ever traces their ideas to him. Placebos should be purely preposterous, because they're clearly mind over matter, just like Wim Hof and moms lifting cars off of babies. This is a huge problem. If we give people red pills, maybe da red ones even work fasta.

[Metamorph]

How do you really know it's sorcery? It's even named in Latin!

[FreelancePoliceman]

Makes sense to me. Sorcery has suffered a lot of academic neglect lately and I think it's time for the mystic arts to make a comeback.