These sorts of things - from blue pills to lasers - are all things which we “know,” even though, like the goldfish, we may not realize that we know them. Much of our knowledge of the world is not an elicitation of what “is,” but rather it is a construction laid atop the world of experience. This is a very difficult concept for many people to grasp. The world that we see and experience seems so palpable and true, and our conceptualizations are so deeply entwined among themselves, that it just seems fantasy to say that the reality I perceive is largely metaphor and construction and is largely projected onto (rather than observed in) the world. These things are generally true, and they are true for many matters of health and medicine. This chapter may not convince a skeptic. But it may encourage the enquiring, and its goal is to make the strangeness of the placebo effect and the meaning response somewhat less strange. The price to be paid is that everything else gets rather more strange. C'est la vie.

Proper meals, clothing, pills

In the United States, we “know” that one eats (or, ought to eat) three meals a day; if you don't, your mother gets mad at you.