Truth Is Not the Same as Effect

For years I sold something that worked. Customers came back. Athletes swore by it. People told their friends about it. The feedback wasn’t staged. The excitement was real.

And scientifically, everything pointed to placebo.

No measurable effect in controlled studies. No detectable frequency in the hologram. No bio-energy, no resonance, no physical mechanism. Double-blind tested, the result: no provable effect beyond placebo.

But people felt it. Thousands. That wasn’t collective madness. That wasn’t mass hysteria. That was the placebo effect, and the placebo effect is real.

This is the point where most people stop thinking. Either it works, or it’s fraud. Either science is right, or the customers are right. But it’s not that simple.

The placebo effect is one of the most thoroughly studied mechanisms in medicine. It’s measurable. It’s reproducible. 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’ desire for it to work.

The question that has occupied me since then isn’t whether it worked. It worked. 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 ethics committees, approval processes, standards. Yet every good doctor uses the placebo effect. Through attention, through communication, through the trust they build. That’s not 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. Security. Belonging. Simple answers to complex questions. The effect is real. The basis often isn’t.

I’m not saying this as a moral judgment. I’m saying this as someone who was in the middle of it. I saw how effect without truth works. I sold it. I made my living from it.

What changed me wasn’t the suspicion that it might be placebo. That came at some point. 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.

We live in a world where effect is often more important than truth. A coaching program that makes people feel good sells better than a study that shows what actually helps. A political narrative that promises security wins elections, even if the promised security is an illusion. A supplement that looks like health and feels like health doesn’t need proof of efficacy, as long as the packaging is right.

The mechanics are always the same. If you expect something to work, you feel it working. If you feel it working, you believe in it. And if you believe in it, you pay for it. That’s not a special case. That’s the default.

I’ve seen these mechanics from the inside. 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 makes bad decisions. Whether as a seller, a buyer, a voter, or a person.