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, on the other hand, everything pointed to placebo.

Let me make something clear first: there is no scientifically measurable effect that could be classified as relevant in controlled studies. That isn’t unusual. No demonstrable frequency could be detected in the hologram. Maybe the comparison with the magnetic film of an audio cassette helps here. It doesn’t emit anything either. But a scientifically accepted device like a cassette recorder could read it. A human has their senses and picks up a lot in between, but can they play back an audio cassette? No. Is science particularly strong when it comes to investigating passive objects that come into contact with the human body and do no direct harm? I don’t know, but my gut says no here either.

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

But people felt it anyway. And in their thousands. That wasn’t a collective madness and it wasn’t mass hysteria either, it was a placebo effect that was real.

That sounds like a paradox at first. And it was the point where most people stop thinking and looking for answers beyond the obvious. Either it works or it’s fraud. Either science is right or all the customers are wrong. But it isn’t 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 best-studied mechanisms in medicine. It’s measurable, reproducible and it has physiological foundations. When a person believes that something works, the body responds. Pain subsides, muscles tense up, hormone levels change. This isn’t imagination. It’s biology, triggered by an expectation.

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

If the studies were right, I sold placebo. No active substance, no demonstrable technology, nothing measurable in the product, just expectation, staging and the customers’ wishful thinking that it would work.

The question that has stayed with 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 aren’t allowed to sell placebo as medication. You aren’t allowed to claim an effect that isn’t demonstrable. There are well-developed standards, ethics committees, approval procedures and many more clear guardrails for that. Still, every good doctor uses the placebo effect. Through attention, through communication, through the trust that they build. And that is anything but fraud. That is good medicine.

In marketing these rules don’t exist. Or they are creatively interpreted. You don’t claim cure, you suggest well-being. You don’t say: this heals 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 are true. They work because they serve a need: for safety, for belonging or for simple answers to complicated questions. The effect is experienced as real, even when the foundations often aren’t.

I don’t want to cast myself as a moral authority here. I’m saying this as someone who was in the middle of it and lived with it for years. I’ve seen for myself how effect works without what we accept as common truth. And I sold it. And lived well from it.

What changed me wasn’t the suspicion that it might be placebo. That came on its own at some point. What changed me was the realisation that this is a category of its own. Placebo is neither truth nor lie. It’s something in between, something for which we have no good words. But this is a cultural issue. Western cultures, which I come from too, have for example a rather weak stock of terminology for states of consciousness and we try to lump them into vague terms like “mindfulness”. Far Eastern languages have much broader differentiations, because they have grown culturally, and understanding suddenly becomes easier.

We live in a world where effect is often more important than truth. A coaching programme that sounds factually correct and triggers professional performance sells better than the accompaniment on an inner journey that produces real clarity and purity. A political narrative that promises safety wins elections, even when the promised safety rests on exclusion and thereby becomes an illusion because it only fuels conflicts further. Products that promote health and performance need no proof of effect, as long as the packaging suggests it.

The mechanics are always the same. Whoever expects that something works is more likely to feel an effect. Whoever feels an effect believes in it firmly. And whoever believes in it firmly also pays a high price for it. That isn’t fraud, it’s normal consumer behaviour.

I applied these mechanisms and developed them further. Many said appreciatively: good marketing. Others called me a charlatan. I’m not a convert who now knows how the world works. I’m someone who has learned this one thing: truth and effect are not the same. And whoever doesn’t keep them apart runs the risk of making bad decisions. Whether as a seller, as a consumer, as a voter or as a human being in relationships.