The Placebo Effect

Having aspirin around the house eventually brought back happy memories of the little orange chewable aspirin that I'd taken as a child. I tried to re-create the experience by chewing the regular aspirin, but of course that didn't work, it just tasted bitter and sucked all the moisture out of my mouth. So, after three or four tries, I gave up on it.

But, then I had a brilliant idea. Was it possible that even after so many years the same little orange chewable aspirin were still being manufactured? I went to the grocery store and looked, and sure enough, there they were! So, I bought some, and from then on was able to combine taking an aspirin a day with re-creating happy memories.

Even so, it wasn't long before I lost interest. Taking the aspirin became just another routine that I had to think about, and it didn't have any noticeable benefits. It also seemed like the first step on the road to having a pill organizer, and I wasn't ready for that. I left the aspirin sitting out, though, and I took one whenever I felt like it.

But when did I feel like it? At first it was just when you'd expect, when I had an actual headache or when I thought “hey, daily aspirin”, but later the conditions gradually widened. Did I have some other ache or pain? Aspirin works for that, right? Did I have some other physical condition? Have an aspirin, can't hurt. Was I feeling down for no obvious reason? Might be a cold coming on, better have an aspirin just in case! Or, even if it wasn't a cold, the aspirin still had happy associations.

In that way, I managed to convince myself that I could use little orange chewable aspirin to cure any physical or mental condition whatsoever.

Or, since at some level I did still know it was just aspirin, I guess what I should say is that I learned to play two roles at the same time: the doctor prescribing the placebo, and the patient obliviously taking the placebo and feeling good because ve thinks it will have a real effect. It's an interesting mental contortion, which of course is why I'm telling you about it. It definitely helps that aspirin does have a real effect. It's not a large effect, since we're talking about one children's aspirin for one large adult, and it's not always the right effect, but it is an effect.

Anyway, that situation lasted for a while. I kept buying aspirin and using them to cure whatever I wanted. Then, just over a year ago, I made another breakthrough. I was at home, and there was some problem from work that was vexing me, some piece of code that was giving me the proverbial headache, and I thought “well, if aspirin can cure all these other things, why not also proverbial headaches?”. So I took one, and sure enough, when I went in to work the next day, I had some new ideas and found that the problem was easily solved. Thanks aspirin!

Since then, I've used aspirin to cure many other things.

• Bad weather.
• Other people's physical conditions. (I'm not sure it's polite to interfere with other people's mental conditions.)
• Other people's problems.
• Physical conditions I wasn't aware of yet.
• Physical conditions I didn't even have yet! (And thus was never going to have.)
• Other problems that exist in the world.

As you can see, it's a very flexible system.

And that brings us up to the present. What does the future hold? Probably nothing, since I'm completely satisfied with the current situation. But, if I do ever want to go further, it seems like there's only one final step left to take: gradually reduce the amount of aspirin to zero. If I can do that, then I will have rediscovered the power of prayer.