New Research Finds Placebo Effect More Powerful in Cool People.....

 Boston, MA - Research out of Harvard's Program in Placebo Studies and the Therapeutic Encounter (PiPs) at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston is helping to remove a bit of the mystery from the placebo effect, finding that it is more effective in cool people.

Ted "The Hammer" Kaptchuk, shown here in 1987 being much cooler than all the other professors at Harvard could even dream of, doesn't care that he wasn't invited to Jan's Friendsgiving last week

"Placebo can be a powerful medical intervention in about 40% of people," PiPs director Ted Kaptchuk explained. "Until now, which 40% are going to be most likely to benefit from it hasn't been clear. Going forward we can now begin to wield this powerful tool like a scalpel instead of a hammer. Wouldn't that be a cool nickname though? The hammer?"

After anesthesiologist Dr. Henry Beecher discovered the placebo effect when his jug of morphine accidentally tipped over while treating people who exploded during World War 2, it was incorporated into medical research in order to see who was a Russian spy. They quickly realized, however, that their supposedly inert fake treatments worked in a large percentage of subjects, even women. This lead to a revolution in healthcare because any asshole could just up and cure people using placebo instead of going to all four years of medical school.

Despite its promise to take health out of the hands of the elite doctors in their ivory towers and give it to regular people, like chiropractors and psychic healers, not everyone responded to placebo. According to Kaptchuk, increasingly complicated forms of placebo were invented in the hopes of capturing the 60% of people who weren't being helped. "These people were all like, 'I'm a skeptic and placebos don't work on me. Logical fallacy. You did a logical fallacy!' But despite their bad attitudes, we still wanted to help them."

The new research involved randomizing people suffering from grimp into either a placebo group that received a dose of "Nogrimpatol", a sugar pill designed to look like an actual medication, or one that underwent the standard fecal replacement therapy. They then asked subjects to score themselves on a 5-point Likert scale from "I'm a total Urkel!" to "Aaay, I'm cooler than Fonzie!". The Hammer, who supervised the recruitment and statistical analysis for the study, wasn't surprised by the results. "People who fell into the Fonzie group, but also those that were in the slightly less cool MacGyver range, responded most to the placebo intervention. This explains why I have always been so sensitive to them myself and why they don't work on Jan."