The Power of Narrative

 I've been thinking about the role of what I call "mechanicals and psychologicals" in the healing process. The placebo effect (psychologicals) fascinates me, which could be called the courage to get well, or the power of belief. Mechanicals are what happens in the absence of the placebo effect. This is what happens with an intervention to a person who is completely unaware that an intervention has taken place. AFAIK we don't study that, we only do placebo controlled double blind tests to find beneficial effects beyond placebo. I can't think of a way to do an ethical test of medical interventions in a person who remains completely unaware of it, so if that kind of thing has been done It's unlikely we would know about it.

Mechanicals trump psychologicals...the effect can be larger, sometimes by a lot. Thought experiment - give two study groups little white pills with the message "a great advance in medical science", one group gets a placebo and the other group a lethal dose of something. Yeah that doesn't end well for the latter group, and the placebo group feels better.

But at the margins the placebo effect can be larger than mildly negative mechanicals...the placebo effect is stronger than mildly negative mechanicals are negative. The most positive effect possible happens in the context of the sum of the placebo effect and effective mechanicals. But placebo controlled trials are currently only used to weed out ineffective mechanicals.

None of this is lost on BigP, which has studied the effect of placebo more than any other group. None of the drugs they have for the "metabolic conditions", which are all food borne, are particularly effective, and they generate huge profits. BigP has a lock on the narrative, they basically write the legislation around medical intervention, and etc etc.

So here is a fun fact, BigP is not required and does not do placebo controlled trials on vaccines. And the strength of the placebo effect varies according to the power of the narrative.

Consider the case where the intervention has neutral to even slightly negative mechanicals in the context of the most powerful health narrative to date. The narrative that says "we'll be free again, things will go back to normal, and absent this intervention this vile disease will never go away". And that narrative is fed to a population that has obeyed the rules and stayed "locked down" for a year.

And let's also note that solitary confinement is one of the worst things that can be done to human health, we are social creatures. It's a blend of negative mechanicals and negative psychologicals.

Let me also be clear I am not saying the mechanical effect of vaccines is ineffective or slightly negative. I'm simply saying we have no real way of knowing what it is in the absence of placebo controlled trials. The 95% effective narrative is certainly compelling, the one we desperately want to hear after being locked down for a year. But in scientific terms it is a slapdash narrative, and potentially disingenuous.

And the thing about widely and strongly held narratives is if one tries to pop that belief bubble you'll be lynched by a mob of believers. Trump is the perfect example as it is so easy for us social progressives to see. Half of the population continues to be mesmerized. The power of narrative and the placebo effect are essentially the same phenomena. But mechanicals still trump psychologicals, which makes "population control" a very sloppy science.

Is the primary role of government to protect and serve the body politic, or population control? Should we even care? Individually we have little control over the shifting of the tectonic social plates. These epocal shifts are largely the result of unconscious herd behavior. To think otherwise is delusional and even hubristic IMHO. But to think otherwise is also the dream that won't die, and the most powerful narrative of all.

Digressing for a bit, I prefer the terms social progressive and patriarchal over the terms liberal and conservative. These more common terms are nearly meaningless unless the word fiscal comes before, and they certainly don't describe the Trump phenomenon, making the narrative around Trump into a very blurry picture. Sociology and economics have been smushed into one thing. Socionomics? Hello Prechter.

Anyway. The measure of the degree of the true mechanical effect of vaccines is disallowed by a multi trillion $ industry that understands the power of narrative better than anyone, and controls related legislation.

Food for thought.