The Placebo Effect, Prescription Drugs, and the Truth Behind Healthcare Advertising

In today’s episode, your host, Jon LaClare, leads an important conversation that healthcare marketing rarely explains: the placebo effect and why it deserves far more attention. This discussion is inspired by the launch of Pluseebo, a transparent, intentionally humorous product designed to spark awareness around belief, expectation, and honesty in healthcare.

While Pluseebo is lighthearted on the surface, its launch highlights a much deeper reality supported by published scientific research. Placebo responses can produce real, measurable biological effects in the body, including changes in brain chemistry, pain perception, and overall wellbeing. These effects are not imagined, and in many clinical trials they closely mirror the average performance of widely prescribed medications.

Tune in as Jon breaks down what healthcare advertising often leaves out, including how modest the average benefit of some antidepressants, pain medications, sleep aids, and other common prescriptions can be when compared to placebo, and why side effects and transparency must be part of the conversation. Grounded in respected medical journals and FDA-reviewed data, this episode offers a research-driven perspective designed to inform, challenge assumptions, and elevate the discussion around modern healthcare. 

Don’t miss this timely conversation on belief, biology, and why understanding the placebo effect changes how health products, treatments, and claims should be evaluated.

In today’s episode of the Harvest Growth Podcast, we’ll cover:

• What the placebo effect actually is, and why it’s not “fake.”
• What large studies reveal about SSRIs, opioids, sleep medications, anxiety medications, ADHD drugs, and statins.
• Why prescription drug commercials rarely tell the full story
• How transparency in healthcare affects trust and decision-making
• How Pluseebo is designed to spark honest conversations.

To learn more about Pluseebo, visit Pluseebo.com.

To be a guest on our next episode of the podcast, contact us today!

Do you have a brand that you’d like to launch or grow? Do you want help from a partner that has successfully launched hundreds of brands totaling over $2 billion in revenues? Visit HarvestGrowth.com and set up a free consultation with us today!

Transcript

Announcer [00:00:00]:
Are you looking for new ways to make your sales grow? You've tried other podcasts, but they don't seem to know. Harvest the growth potential of your product or service as we share stories and strategies that'll make your competitors nervous. Now here's the host of the Harvest Growth podcast, Jon LaClare

Jon LaClare [00:00:20]:
Today's episode is going to feel a little different. A little slower, a little deeper, and honestly, a lot more important. As many of you know, we recently launched a product called Pluseebo. The videos we created around it are fun, humorous, and intentionally over the top. But behind all the humor, there's a serious and very real conversation worth having. One that most people will never hear. And that's what this episode is about. Before I get into any data, let me be extremely clear. I am not a doctor. I am not giving any form of medical advice. Please, please speak with your doctor before making any changes to your medications or treatments. Everything I'm sharing today comes straight from published scientific research and well respected medical journals. I'm not creating new claims. I'm summarizing what researchers have already documented. All right, let's start with the foundation. Most people think the placebo effect is basically nothing. A sugar pill, a fake treatment, something that tricks you into thinking you'll feel better. But that's not what the science says. That's not even close. Placebos can produce real, measurable changes inside the human body. Changes in brain chemistry, endorphin release, dopamine activity, improved sense of well being, lower pain response. Harvard researchers, among many others, have found that depending on the condition, the placebo effect can be as strong as 30 to 60% of the real drug. That's huge. And it gets even more interesting. The placebo effect works best when you don't know it's a placebo, which is why clinical trials are double blinded. But even when people are told directly this is a placebo, this pill contains nothing active, many still improve. These are called open label placebos. People know it's a placebo and they still get better. Not everyone, but enough to make researchers take it seriously. Why does this happen? Because the brain and body respond to the ritual of treatment. Taking a pill, setting an intention, receiving care, paying attention to symptoms. Your brain interprets those cues as signals to activate healing processes. It's not imaginary. Biological scans show real activity. So placebos are not fake. They're real responses triggered by expectation and the brain's own healing pathways. And. And that's the context we need as we explore how many prescription drugs, even very common ones, perform only slightly better than a placebo. Now let's talk about SSRIs, one of the most prescribed classes of medications in the world. If you've watched TV over the last 20 years, you've seen the commercials, you'd think these medications dramatically outperform placebos. But research paints a very different picture. One of the most well known studies on this topic is the 2008 Kirsch Meta analysis published in the journal PLOS Medicine. If I pronounced that correctly, Kirsch and his team looked at the clinical trial data submitted to the fda. Even the unpublished trials that drug companies didn't highlight, what they found was eye opening. On a depression rating scale that goes up to 52 points, the average difference between the real antidepressant and and the placebo was just 1.8. So imagine a 52 point scale and the drug beats placebo by less than 2 points. That's not enough for most people to notice in their daily life, and many clinicians say this difference is not clinically meaningful at all. Again, this doesn't mean the drugs help no one. They do help some people, but across large populations the benefit is far smaller than most people assume. Another major study, the 2018 Lancet Network Meta analysis led by Cipriani and colleagues, reviewed even more data. It confirmed that antidepressants do outperform placebos statistically, but the effect is small. Not zero, but small. Now, small benefits might still be worth it in some situations, but that's where side effects come into play. And SSRIs have some well documented side effects. Things like weight gain, sexual dysfunction, emotional blunting, insomnia and withdrawal symptoms that often feel worse than the original condition. Most concerning, the FDA has a black box warning about increased suicidal thoughts in young people. So when the benefit is modest and the risks are real, it's a conversation worth having. Not anti medication, just honest. Let's shift to opioids Most people believe opioids are the strongest, most reliable painkillers available. And for short term severe pain, like after surgery, they can be very effective. But chronic long term pain, the kind many Americans struggle with every day, the research tells a very different story. One of the biggest and most respected studies on this topic is the Space trial. Published in JAMA in 2018. It compared opioids to non opioid treatments for chronic back pain and knee arthritis. The results were surprising to a lot of people. Opioids did not provide better pain reduction than non opioids, they did not improve physical function. And in some measures, patients on opioids actually did worse. In other words, for chronic pain, opioids were no better than the alternatives and in many cases, even no better than the placebo. And of course, opioids carry significant risks. Addiction tolerance, overdose, respiratory depression, constipation, and a national crisis that has affected millions of families. When a drug with that level of risk barely beats placebo, that's a major problem. Let's step through a few other drug categories so you can see how widespread this pattern can be. Sleep medications like Ambien or Lunesta and help people fall asleep only about 10 to 15 minutes faster than a placebo. That's the average across large studies. For that small benefit, people take on risks like memory problems, dependency, and even dangerous nighttime behaviors. Anti anxiety medications like benzodiazepines create strong short term relief, no question. But after a few weeks, many patients drift back to baseline. At the same time, placebo groups often see significant improvement simply from the reassurance of taking something adult. ADHD medications help many people, but the placebo effect is surprisingly strong Here too. When researchers run trials, the placebo groups often show very meaningful improvements in attention, behavior and focus. Not as strong as the medication, but stronger than most people would guess. And statins, which truly are life saving for high risk patients, offer a much smaller benefit for individuals at low risk. For people with no history of heart disease, the absolute reduction in risk over several years is often just 1 or 2%. But once again, not zero, but small. Now I want to shift to something you've definitely seen prescription drug commercials on tv. The ones where people are smiling, biking, hiking, holding hands on a beach while a calming voice reads a handful of side effects really quickly at the end. But here's what most people don't realize. There have been ongoing discussions among federal regulators about whether drug ads should be required to include all of the known side effects, not just a few, because the current system only shares a tiny snapshot. The full list of side effects is found in the FDA prescribing information, which can run dozens and dozens of pages. If advertisers were required to read all of the side effects, many commercials would become, well, impossible. For some medications, it would take three, four, even five full minutes just to read the entire list of potential side effects out loud. Just five or six of these ads would make the commercials longer than the TV show they're interrupting. And that's the point. The true side effect profiles of many medications are far longer and far more extensive than consumers ever hear about. Again, that's not my opinion. That's straight from the prescribing documents themselves. So how does all of this connect back to placebo? Prescription medications can be life saving. Some are absolutely essential. But others, especially the ones heavily advertised, may offer only small improvements over placebo while carrying long, complex lists of potential side effects. Pluseebo is our humorous way of shining a light on that reality. We're not mocking real illness. We're not replacing real treatments. We're saying, here is one product that is completely honest about what it is. No chemicals, no harmful ingredients, no side effects, no complicated trade offs. Just the power of belief. Openly, transparently and safely. If you want to see what placebo is all about, or you want to try it for yourself, or maybe get it as a fun conversation starting gift for a friend or family member, head over to Pluseebo.com it's spelled differently. P L U S E E B O .com, Pluseebo.com Again, this is not medical advice. I am not a doctor. I'm simply sharing what published research already shows. But I hope this episode gave you a better picture of the placebo effect, the importance of understanding clinical data, and why transparency matters so much in health care. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next time.