Tell us a little bit about that and how to recognize when that thing is so toxic or so pervasive that it starts like permeating into the culture of an organization.

Yeah, I mean, so the nocebo effect, you know, every time you have a potential placebo effect, you have a potential nocebo effect.

Like you say, it's the exact mirror image of it.

The opposite is the evil twin.

We know that is true within medicine.

You know, if you kind of prime people to believe that they're going to get ill, they do get ill.

And it results in physiological changes, often things like raising inflammation, blood pressure, activating the nervous system in ways that you don't want.

Talk to us a little bit about this nature and nurture kind of, you know, conflict and tension and how you kind of run through that for us.

In fact, David has experienced the effect firsthand a few years back.

Yeah.

So I was going through a pretty, um, pretty horrible time in my life when I had this kind of, um, uh, kind of mounting depression, I'd say.

Like, it was like waves of kind of sadness and, you know, low moods that were getting just kind of increasing in intensity.

So yeah, I went to my doctor.

I was prescribed antidepressants, and, um, the doctor, you know, as, uh, she was obliged to do, she told me that they could have some side effects, which included, um, migraines or really bad headaches.

Now, you know, soon after taking the antidepressants, I felt like I was probably, you know, experiencing some benefit to my mood.

Patients should have been able to carry on with their treatment without even noticing the difference.

And David, well, he had a great example from July eighteenth, nineteen ninety-seven at stage twelve of the Tour de France.

Yeah.

So this was, um, uh, Richard Virenque who had heard on the kind of circuit amongst his kind of colleagues and competitors that there was this kind of mystery drug that was gonna-- that could really give you a boost.

And so he, he asked his team to get him some and to give it before, uh, a particularly difficult trial for him.

I think it was a time trial, like, you know, it wasn't his forte by any means.

Now, uh, the member of his team that was kind of in, in charge of that, he, you know, he was really skeptical.

Not...

He had one more genuinely eye-opening study that suggested that our expectations can even change the quality of our eyesight.

it can traverse all types, but I'm thinking elderly people just massively generalising who may not be into technology, who may not have what they need to get out and about as much, who may be more physically isolated.

Families are just much more spread out these days than they have been in the past.

And that's wonderful in some ways in that it gives people a lot more opportunities to explore the world.

But it does mean that then I think some generations feel that they've been left behind a little.

And then if you've got a physical disability on top of that, it can be very difficult to actually forge those connections that you'd like.

If you can't visit your family, if you can't travel large distances and you can't easily get out into your community, that is tough.

I do think there is a big argument actually for technological literacy and for having programmes to support older people and becoming more technologically literate, because we can't just assume that everyone has been able to learn those skills.

Look at your place in things.

affects our life today and how we can utilize that mindset in whatever we're facing.

Yeah, so that doctor was Henry Beecher.

And, you know, based on his wartime experiences, he then kind of came up with this idea of the placebo-controlled trial, which is where you compare each active ingredient in a drug.

So each, you know, the real pills with a placebo ingredient pill, which is inactive.

It's made from sugar or flour.

Now, that then meant we've just got a huge amount of data, actually, on the power of the placebos in themselves.

And what you would find is that lots of patients do tend to, just as he had observed in the war, lots of patients do tend to improve even when they're taking this dummy pill.

You tell the story, okay?