Truth Is Not the Same as Effect

It worked. Customers came back, athletes swore by it, it got recommended, it was the perfect product. And for years I sold something that really worked. The feedback wasn’t staged, it reflected genuine excitement.

Scientifically, everything pointed to placebo.

Let me be clear: there is no scientifically relevant effect that was measurable in controlled studies. That’s not unusual. No detectable frequency could be found in the hologram. Maybe the comparison with the magnetic film of a cassette tape helps here. It doesn’t emit anything either. But a scientifically recognized device like a cassette player could read it. Humans have their senses and they perceive many things in between, but can they play a cassette tape? No. Is science particularly well developed when it comes to investigating passive objects that come into contact with the human body and cause no direct harm? I don’t know, but my gut says no to that as well.

The fact is, no bio-energy, no resonance, no physical mechanism was detectable within the scope of the studies conducted. And it was double-blind tested multiple times. The result: no detectable effect in a range that would have allowed any factual conclusion or argument other than placebo. Researchers did find something, but the inference to strength, balance and health was not scientifically plausible.

But people felt it anyway. Thousands of them. That wasn’t collective madness and it wasn’t mass hysteria. It was a placebo effect, and it was real.

At first that sounds like a paradox. And it was the point where most people stop thinking and stop looking for answers beyond the obvious. Either it works or it’s fraud. Either science is right or the customers are all wrong. But it’s not that simple. At least I didn’t want to make it that simple for myself. Because I had all the customer feedback on the table.

The placebo effect is one of the most thoroughly studied mechanisms in medicine. It’s measurable, reproducible and it has physiological foundations. When a person believes something works, the body reacts. Pain decreases, muscles tense up, hormone levels change. That’s not imagination. That’s biology, triggered by expectation.

In medicine, the placebo effect is factored into every drug study. Every medication has to prove it works better than placebo, because placebo does work. Not always, not for everyone, not for everything, but often enough that you can’t ignore it.

If the studies were right, I sold placebo. No active ingredient, no provable technology, nothing measurable in the product. Expectation, staging and the customers’ wishful thinking that it works.

The question that has occupied me since then isn’t whether it worked. It worked. Even when nobody said what it was designed for. It still worked for many people. The question is: what do we do with this knowledge?

In medicine, there are clear rules. You can’t sell placebo as medication. You can’t claim an effect that isn’t provable. There are mature standards, ethics committees, approval processes and many other clear guardrails. Yet every good doctor uses the placebo effect. Through attention, through communication, through the trust they build. And that is anything but fraud. That’s good medicine.

In marketing, those rules don’t exist. Or they get interpreted creatively. You don’t claim healing, you suggest well-being. You don’t say: this will cure you. You say: feel the difference. And the customer feels it, because they want to feel it.

In politics, it works the same way. Narratives don’t work because they’re true. They work because they serve a need. For security, for belonging or for simple answers to complicated questions. The effect is perceived as real, even if the foundations often aren’t.

I don’t want to position myself as a moral authority here. I’m saying this as someone who was in the middle of it and experienced all of it for years. I saw for myself how effect works without what we recognize as commonly accepted truth. And I sold it. And made a good living from it.

What changed me wasn’t the suspicion that it might be placebo. That came at some point on its own. What changed me was the realization that this is an entirely separate category. Placebo is neither truth nor lie. It’s something in between. Something we don’t have good words for. But that’s a cultural issue. Western cultures, which I come from, have a rather limited vocabulary for states of consciousness and we try to compress these into vague terms like “mindfulness.” In East Asian linguistic cultures, there are much greater, because culturally grown, differentiations and understanding suddenly becomes easier.

We live in a world where effect is often more important than truth. A coaching program that sounds factually correct and triggers professional performance sells better than guidance on an inner journey that produces genuine clarity and purity. A political narrative that promises security wins elections, even if the promised security is based on exclusion and becomes an illusion because it only fuels more conflict. Products that promote health and performance don’t need proof of efficacy as long as the packaging suggests it.

The mechanics are always the same. If you expect something to work, you’re more likely to feel an effect. If you feel an effect, you believe in it firmly. And if you believe in it firmly, you’ll pay a high price for it. That’s not fraud, that’s normal consumer behavior.

I applied these mechanisms and developed them further. Many said approvingly: good marketing. Others called me a charlatan. I’m not a convert who now knows how the world works. I’m someone who learned this one thing: truth and effect are not the same. And anyone who can’t tell them apart risks making bad decisions. Whether as a seller, a buyer, a voter or a person in relationships.