My mind seems to not want to let the phenomena of "placebo" go because it is the closest thing to scientifically proven "magic" there is right now.

Today I woke up with the question: "Is there any scientific evidence that belief in placebo itself can trigger the placebo effect?"

The reason this question is important is because it changes the "locus of control" from others deceiving you into the placebo effect, into your conscious control.

As it turns out: There’s actually a small but growing body of evidence suggesting that belief in the placebo effect itself can trigger measurable changes, even when people know they’re taking a placebo.

The clearest examples come from “open-label placebo” (OLP) studies, where participants are told up front that they are receiving an inert substance. Surprisingly, people still report improvements in conditions like chronic pain, irritable bowel syndrome, migraine, and even depression.

Irritable bowel syndrome (Kaptchuk et al., 2010): Patients knowingly given placebos showed clinically meaningful symptom relief compared to a no-treatment group.

Chronic low back pain (Carvalho et al., 2016): Participants openly taking placebo pills reported reduced pain and disability.

Migraine (Kam-Hansen et al., 2014): Even when patients were told a pill was a placebo, it still reduced headache pain compared to no treatment.

Depression (2016, Psychiatry Research): OLP treatment was associated with reduced depressive symptoms.

Now you can probably deduce the reason why I find this question interesting. If you replace the word "Placebo" with "Magic", can the results of the placebo studies be extrapolated upon the phenomenon of magic? I think so because it all deals with belief and conviction in an outcome.

The studies show that belief in placebo - even while knowing it’s “only placebo” - can still generate real, measurable effects. That’s essentially the same logic people throughout history have used when speaking of magic: the conviction that ritual, symbol, or spoken intention produces change in the world.

Placebo studies prove that expectation and belief can trigger real biochemical and neurological changes.

If someone are convinced that “magic works,” the very act of belief in magic can be enough to summon the same expectation-driven physiological responses.

The ritual or symbol becomes a container for belief. It doesn’t matter if it’s a sugar pill, a Latin incantation, or a moonlit spell - it’s the belief that makes the mechanism fire.

What’s called “placebo” in medicine might be the modern, sanitized name for what older cultures called magic.

Magic could be understood as the deliberate, conscious use of belief to shape reality.

The evidence from placebo suggests that magic doesn’t need to be “supernatural” to be real - it only needs belief deep enough to trigger the cascade of effects, both inner and outer.

So if we extrapolate: belief in magic itself could activate the same pathways as belief in placebo, and the stronger the conviction, the more potent the effect.

The placebo effect - understood to be magic - and interpreted through the lens of non-duality where there is no difference between the outer and the inner world, or the hermetic world view where "all is mind", has the potential to change the world.

If I am correct in all of this, then our belief about the world fundamentally shapes our experience of that world and the actions we take within it. Since our experience and actions are the primary ways we interact with reality, our beliefs become a self-fulfilling prophecy - external placebo by another name.