“A placebo is a sham medical intervention. In one common placebo procedure, a patient is given an inert sugar pill, told that it may improve his/her condition, but not told that it is in fact inert. Such an intervention may cause the patient to believe the treatment will change his/her condition; and this belief does indeed sometimes have a therapeutic effect, causing the patient’s condition to improve. This phenomenon is known as the placebo effect.”

I added the bolding myself for emphasis. If the power of positive thinking can have a proven therapeutic effect, it is reasonable to assert that drinkers of MonaVie may be experiencing this. Why might people think MonaVie would improve his/her condition? I can think of three reasons (there may be more):

• Distributors or the Internet say is does – You can search Google and find tons of references of MonaVie being linked to supposedly helping people with autism. These are unverifiable claims that may be added by distributors to help sell their product.
• MonaVie’s serving size is medicine-sized – People are used to taking medicine in doses of 1 ounce or less. People drink juices in serving sizes of 8 ounces or more. MonaVie’s juice is in a 1 ounce serving size increasing it’s similarity to juice. You’ll never hear anyone talk about drinking MonaVie as a thirst-quenching beverage like any other juice.
• Distirbutors use language like “taking” MonaVie – You’ll hear people say all the time that they “take” MonaVie in the morning and night. You “take” pills and medicine – not juice. No one says that they “take” a glass of orange juice at night time. You drink juice. Listen for when people say that they are taking MonaVie and you can spot that they may be subtly trying to trick you (or they are unaware that they’ve been tricked themselves) that it’s medicine.

It’s also worth noting that’s an additional placebo effect here… the Price-Placebo Effect. Scientists have shown that people perceive a product to have more value when they pay more for it. They not only think that, but the product seems to “work” more because of it. In fact, people told they were spending more money for a energy drink actually performed better on mental tasks.

So we see here that there are two reasons why MonaVie may appear to provide some kind of benefit to a person – without physically providing it. Some may say that it’s irrelevant, they just want the benefit. I understand that line of thinking, but realize that placebos can be had cheaply. If you really want the Price-Placebo effect, you should buy your placebos from a friend at a high price and sell him yours at the same high price.

It is well-worth noting that one can’t argue it’s not the placebo effect as it works subconsciously. They simply can’t know what’s in their subconscious as that is the very definition of subconscious. So if someone says that they know their body and MonaVie helped it and it wasn’t the placebo effect (as I’ve seen numerous times), you know that they really don’t understand the placebo effect and how it works.

Frequent commenter, Vogel adds a great point:

“We should also bear in mind that this is not just a typical placebo effect situation, but rather one in which there are tangible rewards for believing that Monavie acts like a drug (e.g., group acceptance, better sales, greater profit) and clear disadvantages to not believing (group ostracism, reduced ability to sell the product convincingly, etc.). In other words, the placebo effect is being strongly coerced.”

Update: Some claim that it’s not possible for a placebo to have the effects that they are seeing on people. Those people would be flat out wrong.

Non-alcoholic beer can make people act drunk

Did you know that the placebo effect can make people act like they are drunk when they haven’t had any alcohol? It’s true… see this Victoria University study. Here are a few quotes:

“We found people who thought they were intoxicated were more suggestible and made worse eyewitnesses compared with those who thought they were sober,” Seema Assefi says.

“In fact the ‘vodka and tonic’ students acted drunk, some even showing physical signs of intoxication,” she adds.

and:

When told, the sober students reacted with disbelief.

“When students were told the true nature of the experiment at the completion of the study, many were amazed that they had only received plain tonic, insisting that they had felt drunk at the time,” she comments.

Dr Garry concludes: “It showed that even thinking you’ve been drinking affects your behaviour.

Clearly it is quite possible that the people making MonaVie testimonies are like the drunken students insisting that they feel something that clearly isn’t there.

There’s also the famous non-alcoholic keg party prank that Princeton pulled that duplicated the effects:

Update : I read an article here that the placebo effect even helps those who know it is a placebo. I’m not sure how that plays into things, I just found it interesting.

Originally posted 2009-11-24 10:00:10. Republished by Blog Post Promoter