Lumifer comments on Open thread, Dec. 14 - Dec. 20, 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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My n=1 experiment evidences against this. When my son was much younger and complained some part of him was hurting (because, say, he bumped against a wall) I would put lotion on the part and say it was powerful medicine. It usually made him feel better. And I wasn't even lying because the medicine I had in mind was the placebo effect.
You were not measuring actual improvement -- you were measuring the amount of whining/complaining.
Which is strongly correlated with pain. A reduction in pain is an actual improvement.
No, not in the sense we are talking about here. Pain is known to be quite psychosomatic, anyway.