The World’s Oldest Doctor The World’s Oldest Doctor
Wellbeing

The World’s Oldest Doctor

The Power of the Placebo Effect
January Weiner
Reading
time 11 minutes

Let me tell you about a doctor who has been treating patients with a wide array of illnesses for many years, always using the same proven therapy, and who, after hours, even helps audiophiles to enjoy listening to music. His name is Dr. Placebo.

He went and did it. Not long ago, our uncle, an impassioned audiophile, bought himself a new cable made of pure gold, a true bargain at just 1000 zlotys (some £200). There would be nothing strange about it – well, nothing very strange, as far as our uncle is concerned anyway – had this not been a USB cable. And USB, as we know, is used to transfer digital data; ones and zeros. To be sure, generally all cables should be of good quality, but a gold cable for 1000 zlotys will transfer digital data in exactly the same way as any cheaper, decent-quality cable.

Of course, we are wasting our time trying to convince our uncle of this. He initially tries to explain that there is less noise because this cable, as he puts it, “loses fewer bits”. Given that we happen to know a bit about error correction and data transmission, we can quickly disregard this line of argument. But then he resorts to his last line of defence, a conclusive one, for which there is no counter-argument: “I have tried both cables, and I can simply hear the difference.”

The problem is

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