Just a Placebo

Summary

What does the placebo effect actually reveal, once you stop using it to dismiss healing you don't understand? 

In this fourth episode Kin turns from his father's individual miracles to the mechanics of healing itself, opening with an acupuncturist who feels the same "qi" his family does and moving through decades of placebo research — sugar pills whose size, color, and price change their effect, sham knee surgery that heals as well as real surgery, and a study in which only the prescribing dentist's belief (not the patient's) changed outcomes — to argue that placebo is less a "mind trick" than an embodied ritual, one that mainstream medicine performs just as much as it accuses alternative healing of doing. 

Kin lands on a position of strong agnosticism — code-switching between mainstream and Chinese medicine rather than picking one as more real — while acknowledging, through his father's attempts to remotely heal a troubled relative, the real limits and dangers of that confidence, setting up the next episode's turn to his father's healing as an act of intimacy rather than mechanical fixing.

See also: 

• Kneebone 2016 - Performing Surgery: Commonalities with Performers Outside Medicine  https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5006638/ 
• Johnson 1994 - Surgery as a placebo https://www.proquest.com/docview/198981324?pq-origsite=gscholar&fromopenview=true&sourcetype=Scholarly%20Journals 
• Moseley et al 2002 - A Controlled Trial of Arthroscopic Surgery for Osteoarthritis of the Knee https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa013259 
• Kaptchuk interviewed by Shankar Vedantam on The Dramatic Cure https://www.hidde     nbrain.org/podcast/the-dramatic-cure/
• Kaptchuk 2000 - The Web That Has No Weaver: Understanding Chinese Medicine https://www.goodwillbooks.com/the-web-that-has-no-weaver-understanding-969-9780809228409.html 
• Kaptchuk 2010 - Placebos without Deception: A Randomized Controlled Trial in Irritable Bowel Syndrome https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3008733/ 
• Cheung 2025 - “Placebo Effects, Qi, and Intention_ How Biomedical Hegemony Polices Competing Paradigms” (ch10_p197-222) https://www.liverpooluniversitypress.co.uk/doi/book/10.3828/9781836245643 
• Lévi- Strauss, C. ([1958] 1998), ‘The Sorcerer and His Magic’ in P. J. Brown (ed.)
• Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield Publishing Company), 129– 37.
• Moerman 2012 - Meaning, Medicine and the 'Placebo Effect' https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/meaning-medicine-and-the-placebo-effect/C189929ABE972E5D4C7FE32008EE8838 
• Tilley, H. (ed.) (2021), Therapeutic Properties: Global Medical Cultures, Knowledge and
• Law. Osiris. Vol. 36 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press).
• Solomon, M. (2015), Making Medical Knowledge (Oxford: Oxford University Press).
• Gracely et al. 1985 - Clinicians' expectations influence placebo analgesia. https://www.jameslindlibrary.org/gracely-rh-dubner-r-deeter-wr-wolskee-pj-1985/ 
• Scheid 2020 - Some Moments in the Encounter between Chinese Medicine and Covid-19 https://www.asianmedicinezone.com/p/the-pan-of-pandemics-why-and-how?open=false#%C2%A7some-moments-in-the-encounter-between-chinese-medicine-and-covid-19 
• Cheung 2021 - Merit, Karma, and Exchange: Chinese Buddhist Mountain Tourism Company Listings on the Stock Market https://academic.oup.com/jaar/article-abstract/89/3/931/6377686?redirectedFrom=fulltext 
• Raz and Harris eds 2016 - Placebo Talks: Modern perspectives on placebos in society https://global.oup.com/academic/product/placebo-talks-9780199680702?cc=us&lang=en& 

Dr. Kin Cheung is Priscilla Payne Hurd Chair in the Arts and Humanities and Associate Professor of East and South Asian Religions at Moravian University, where he chairs the Religion and Society Department and Philosophy Department. His research investigates how contemporary agents use Buddhist doctrine and ritual practices in Chinese and American contexts as well as transnational networks. Topics include Buddhists in relationship with healing, meditation, ethical dilemmas, economics, capitalism, secularism, whiteness, masculinity, science, and technology. He is editor of Teaching Asia during a Resurgence of Anti-Asian Racism  (Association for Asian Studies, 2024) and co-editor of Buddhism and Healing in the Modern World  (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2024). 

Find Dr. Cheung at moravian.academia.edu/KinCheung and on X: x.com/ProfKinCheung  

Read his latest (open-access) article "A Chinese American Node of Healing: Taiji, Acupuncture, Qigong, and Buddhist Medical Arts" published in Transnational Asia here: transnationalasia.rice.edu/index.php/ta/article/view/127.

Brought to you by Axis Mundi Media, Between Qi and Science is a limited series from the Institute for Religion, Media, and Civic Engagement (IRMCE), in collaboration with the Asian Pacific American Religions Research Initiative (APARRI) through generous funding from the Henry Luce Foundation as part of the Under Gods project. 

Host: Dr. Kin Cheung

Executive Producer: Dr. Bradley Onishi

Producer: Andrew Gill

Original Music, Scoring, and Engineering: Scott Okamoto

Story Editor: Dr. Leah Payne

Production Assistance: Kari Onishi

Cover Art: Eric Zwierzynski