illusion of control & placebo effect

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..In the case of pedestrian crossings, they may even make us safer by forcing us to pay attention to our surroundings. And ultimately, pressing a button doesn't require much effort. Hidden in that (term), is the belief that people are foolish for pressing them or mean for putting buttons there that serve no purpose in the first place. But, they do serve a psychological purpose at the very least, and sometimes they do have an effect.

Now, imagine you are in a scene from a horror film, you are in a elevator, you push the close button, Hurry! The murderer is coming at you! However, again you push the close button, the door won’t close! Psych! The button is fake just like the pedestrian crossing button.

Going back to pedestrian crossing buttons, a while ago The New York Times revealed that the majority of New York's buttons didn't work in 2004. Other cities, such as Boston, Dallas and Seattle, have gone through a similar process, leaving them with their own placebo pedestrian buttons.

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WHAT IS PLACEBO EFFECT?

The placebo effect is an unexplained phenomenon wherein drugs, treatments, and therapies that aren’t supposed to have an effect — and are often fake — miraculously make people feel better. What’s going on? Emma Bryce dives into the mystery of placebos’ bizarre benefits.

Placebo surgeries may sound unethical, but they’re done with participants’ consent and in pursuit of an important question: Does the surgical procedure under consideration really work? In a surprising number of cases, the answer is no.

A 2014 review of 53 trials that compared elective surgical procedures to placebos found that sham surgeries provided some benefit in 74 percent of the trials and worked as well as the real deal in about half. Consider the middle-aged guy going in for surgery to treat his knee pain. Arthroscopic knee surgery has been a common orthopedic procedure in the United States, with about 692,000 of them performed in 2010, but the procedure has proven no better than a sham when done to address degenerative wear and tear, particularly on the meniscus

Meniscus repair is only one commonly performed orthopedic surgery that has failed to produce better results than a sham surgery. 

I of III : what is Illusion of control?

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II of III: what is placebo effect really?

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III of III: placebo effect surgery? really? Yep!

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A back operation called vertebroplasty (done to treat compression fractures in the spine) and something called intradiscal electrothermal therapy, a “minimally invasive” treatment for herniated disks and low back pain, have also produced study results that suggest they may be no more effective than a sham at reducing pain in the long term.