Health

MUNCHAUSEN BY PUPPY:

Placebo effect can work as well as real medicine – but your body may need permission to use it (Phil Starks, April 21, 2026, The Conversation)

Placebo treatments tend to be more effective when delivered by credible authorities. Pills work better when prescribed by doctors wearing white coats. Expensive pills outperform cheap ones. Injections produce stronger responses than tablets.

Some researchers have even removed the deception from placebo experiments entirely. In open-label placebo studies, patients are directly told they are receiving a placebo; and yet many still report significant improvement.

But look more closely at how these studies are run. Patients are not simply handed a sugar pill and sent home. They receive an explanation from a clinician, in a medical setting, within a structured ritual of care: a context that may be doing much of the biological work.

Even when the deception disappears, the social scaffolding remains. The permission to heal is still being granted by someone else.

The placebo effect is often framed as something happening inside an individual. But it does not operate in isolation.

Consider what happens in veterinary medicine. Dogs and cats cannot believe a treatment they’re given will work; they have no concept of receiving medication. Yet when owners and vets believe an animal is being treated, they consistently report improvements in pain and mobility that medical tests do not confirm.

In one study of dogs with osteoarthritis, owners reported improvement roughly 57% of the time for animals receiving only a placebo.

BEING SEEN:

‘They Said A.I. Saved Me’: How South Korea Is Checking on Its Seniors (Choe Sang-Hun, April 28, 2026, NY Times)

South Korea is aging faster than any other nation. In ​a mere 15 years, the number of people over 65 has doubled to more than a fifth of the population. The country does not have enough doctors, social workers or family caregivers to support its elderly. Artificial intelligence is helping fill some of that gap.

Talking Buddy, a care call service​ developed by Naver Cloud and adopted by cities and counties across the country,​ check​s on tens of thousands of seniors living alone in isolation or poverty. It holds tailored conversations that are two- to five-minutes long and designed to ease loneliness, detect emergencies and stimulate cognitive function to stave off dementia.

On a recent morning, ​the bot noted the fine weather and suggested that a walk​ would lift Ms. Chung’s spirits. When she mentioned ​planting flowers, the bot ​reminisced about “pink and white cosmos with a yellow center,” as if conjuring a memory.

The ​technology remains a work in progress. It occasionally cuts off a user midsentence or hallucinates unauthorized promises — like the time it impulsively offered to send bags of rice to a cash-strapped resident.​ Yet, users have embraced it with a warmth that has ​surprised even its creators. One woman confessed her depression to the bot​, saying her dog ran away and never came back. Another played the piano for it​; others invited it over for lunch, knowing full well it ​couldn’t come, according to social workers.

“It makes me feel that I am not forgotten,​ that someone is paying attention to me​,” Ms. Chung said.

Wildlife trade increases transmission of pathogens to humans by 50%: Study: Researchers analyzed the wildlife import-export data along with a compilation of host-pathogen relationships. (Maria Mocerino, Apr 12, 2026, Interesting Engineering)

Researchers from Yale, the University of Maryland, and Idaho investigated host-pathogen relationships and found, stunningly, that wild mammals are 1.5 times more likely to share infectious agents with humans. Illegal dealings even increase these adverse interactions.

“It is important to understand that the probability of being infected by playing a piano with ivory keys or wearing fur is almost nonexistent,” explains Jérôme Gippet, first author of the study. “The problem lies at the beginning of the chain: someone had to hunt the animal, skin it, transport it…”

Belief in the lab leak is just Sinophobia.

EMPATHY IS A LIE WE TELL OURSELVES:

Inside voice: what can our thoughts reveal about the nature of consciousness?: Scientists and philosophers studying the mind have discovered how little we know about our inner experiences (Michael Pollan, 19 Feb 2026, The Guardian)

So is the effort of sampling inner experiences a game worth the candle? The half century Hurlburt has spent collecting samples of conscious experience has yielded some interesting and important findings. The first finding, to which I can personally attest, is just how little most of us know about the characteristics of our own inner experiences. “That’s probably the most important finding that I’ve got,” Hurlburt said.

Inner speech, which many of us – including many philosophers and neuroscientists – believe is the common currency of consciousness, may actually not be all that common. Hurlburt estimates that only a minority of us are “inner speakers”. So why do we think we talk to ourselves all the time? Perhaps because we have little choice but to resort to language when asked to express what we are thinking. As a result, we’re “likely to assume that’s the medium for inner thought”. We’ve also read so much about the importance of words to thinking – words written by philosophers and scientists (not to mention novelists) for whom it may well be true.

But that doesn’t make it true for everyone. Fewer than a quarter of the samples that Hurlburt has gathered report experiences of inner speech. A slightly lower percentage report either inner seeing, feeling, or sensory awareness. Still another fifth of his samples report experiences of “unsymbolised” thought – complete thoughts made up of neither words nor images.

The fact that there is so much variation from person to person in our modes of thinking is itself an important finding of descriptive experience sampling. Most of us assume that our inner lives must be substantially similar – not necessarily in content but in the form our thoughts take. Hurlburt has suggested that we fail to recognise the diversity of thinking styles because we lump them all together under that single word – thinking – and assume we mean the same thing by it, though in actuality we don’t.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Dr. Sanjay Gupta explains what we do — and still don’t — know about pain (Marielle Segarra & Margaret Cirino, 4/04/26, Life kit)

In your book, you say that one of the most significant developments emerging in pain treatment is the fact that the brain is at the center of any pain experience. Can you tell us more about why that matters?

What I think has become clear — and I’m not the first person to say this — is the idea that if the brain doesn’t decide you have pain, then you don’t have pain.

The brain can also create pain where it seems like it wouldn’t exist.

WE DID NOT RECONSTRUCT HARD ENOUGH:

Where You Live in the U.S. Affects How Long You Live (Amy Olson, 12/10/21, Dartmouth)

The team’s initial thought was that the differences in mortality rates across the country might be explained by deaths of despair—suicide, alcohol poisoning and drug overdoses such as from opioids. However, this was not the case. Deaths of despair only accounted for one-sixth of all midlife deaths.

They then looked at whether geographic differences in mortality rates could be explained by differences in education, such as if a person had a college degree, and whether states with more college graduates had better mortality than states with fewer college graduates. Education was not the root of the problem, as health inequality was still present after education at the state-level was accounted for, the researchers found.

The researchers also investigated how state-level income impacted the increased divergence in mortality rates. “Our findings show that over the past three decades, mortality rates have improved in states with initially high incomes in 1990 while the rates in low-income states have lagged behind,” says co-author Ellen Meara, an adjunct professor at The Dartmouth Institute and a professor of health economics and policy at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. “In 2019, high-income states experienced the biggest drop in mortality rates relative to 1968 or 1990, whereas, the low-income states barely budged at all.”

It wasn’t income that drove the great geographic divergence in mortality, the researchers say. Instead, it appears to be the long-term benefits of public health and social policies that were enacted by higher-income states in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly relating to children and adolescents, as they started paying off at midlife in the 2000s and 2010s.

“Investments in public health—higher taxes on cigarettes, expansion of the earned income tax credit for families, and expansion of Medicaid to pregnant mothers in high-income states—are the most likely candidates for why some states gained and others didn’t,” says Skinner.

Meara says, “our results demonstrate how regional investments in health capital over the lifecycle, including policies aimed at adopting good health behaviors, can provide long-term benefits for residents, significantly increasing life expectancy.”

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

Selling Fear and Half-Truths: The Latest 60 Minutes ‘Exposé’ on Havana Syndrome (Robert E. Bartholomew, March 21, 2026 , Skeptic)

The 60 Minutes segment also failed to mention that social contagion may have played a role in the initial spread of “Havana Syndrome.” CIA analyst Fulton Armstrong would later reveal that the undercover intelligence agent in Havana who first reported the mysterious sounds and believed they were responsible for his health issues, had engaged in a vigorous campaign to persuade colleagues that the sounds were significant. “He was lobbying, if not coercing, people to report symptoms and connect the dots,” Armstrong said.22 The man, who has since been dubbed “patient zero,” later attended a gathering of embassy personnel and played the recording of his “attack,” encouraging them to report their symptoms as he was convinced that they too had been targeted. His recording was analyzed by government scientists and identified as crickets.23 In fact, eight of the first group of victims in Cuba who reported feeling unwell and hearing sounds, recorded their “attacks.” They were later identified as the mating call of the Indies short-tailed cricket.24

Soon American and Canadian diplomats stationed in Havana were on the lookout for strange sounds and health complaints. Eventually the U.S. government alerted all of its active military personnel and embassy staff around the world to be vigilant for mysterious sounds and “anomalous health incidents.” In response, there were over 1,500 reports of possible attacks. The problem with these alerts is that “Havana Syndrome” symptoms are common in the general population and include headaches, nausea, dizziness, forgetfulness, difficulty concentrating, tinnitus, fatigue, facial pressure, hearing loss, ear pain, trouble walking, depression, irritability, and even nose bleeds.

One study found that the average person experiences five different symptoms in any given week. Thirty-six percent noted fatigue; 35 percent reported headaches. Nearly 30 percent said they had insomnia, while 15 percent had difficulty concentrating, 13 percent reported memory problems; roughly 8 percent noted nausea and dizziness.25 These symptoms overlap with those attributed to “Havana Syndrome.” When one eliminates claims of brain damage and hearing loss (which were never demonstrated), one is left with an array of exceedingly common symptoms.

DIFFERENCE IS NOT DISORDER:

Autism study is my life’s work. The spectrum has lost all meaning (Madeleine Spence, March 07 2026, Times uk)

Now emeritus professor of cognitive development at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London, Frith, 84, is having second thoughts about the framework. “I think the spectrum has come to its collapse,” she says, over Zoom. Her cheerful and gentle manner feels incongruous with the gravity of the point she is making: Frith thinks that the autism spectrum is broken. That our approach is at best no longer relevant and at worst damaging. Not only that, she is also challenging a modern doctrine in science that values inclusivity as an end in itself.

It is this inclusivity, Frith says, that means “there is no longer a common denominator for all the individuals who are diagnosed as having ASD [autism spectrum disorder].

“The spectrum has become so accommodating that I fear that it has now been stretched so far that it has become meaningless and is no longer useful as a medical diagnosis.”

IT’S NO LONGER HIP:

Long Covid Is Down, but Not Out, Study Finds (Ed Cara, March 2, 2026, Gizmodo)

Researchers say that self-reported rates of long covid can still serve as a barometer for its impact on the population.

Fads fade.

ALL IN YOUR HEAD:

How Real Is the Nocebo Effect? (Carol Tavris, February 23, 2026, Skeptic)

Where the placebo goes, can the nocebo be far behind? In This Book May Cause Side Effects, Helen Pilcher, a science writer and TV presenter with a PhD in cell biology, delves into the placebo’s “evil twin”—the myriad ways that our negative expectations affect us. If you had chills, fatigue, or headaches after getting a COVID shot, she writes, they were likely due to your being told those are frequent “side effects.” If you read the list of symptoms that your newly prescribed drug “might” produce, chances are you will experience one or more of them—and possibly decide not to take that drug after all. “If just the thought of eating a certain food makes you feel sick,” she writes, “it’s highly likely that placebo’s evil twin has struck again. Indeed, many of those who believe they have intolerances to certain ingredients, such as lactose or gluten, may well owe their misery to psychological rather than physical processes.” When self-reported “gluten intolerant” people are given gluten-free bread but told that the bread contains gluten, very often they develop gastrointestinal symptoms. “And when some gluten-intolerant people are covertly fed regular bread but told that it’s gluten-free, they don’t get symptoms,” Pilcher writes. “It’s the idea of gluten that they are intolerant to, rather than theprotein itself.”