Self-Induced Placebo Effect

So for those of you who don't know, the placebo effect, in summary, is when you take something which doesn't treat your disease on a medical level, but it'll make you feel better anyway. Apparently it works best when you have solid faith in the "medicine" (which in reality, is a sugar-pill) you're taking, and then you'll magically feel better later. Anyway, I've got it in my head that if faith is all I need to feel better, why don't I just convince myself that what I'm taking is working, so I feel better anyway?

Yeah except it doesn't work that way. I briefly mentioned doing this in my previous post, and yeah, as you would expect, I still feel like shit. It probably has something to do with the fact that deep down I know what I'm taking doesn't really help, but I'm trying so hard to make myself believe that it does help, except there's the subtle difference between imagining a pink elephant and legitimately believing that there's a pink elephant there.

I'd like to think that faith was all I needed, and it's in times like these that I wish I were deeply religious. Then I could lie in bed and pray to whatever divinity I believed in, then they'd cure me miraculously. If not, then at least I can say that the illness I feel is in fact a trial placed upon me by a divine being--- but truth is I'd probably think that whatever "divine being" did this to me is a complete asshole, making me sick when I have lectures to attend.

Anyway, imagination failed, no devout religion to turn to, I'm trialling another tactic, where I'm just taking in a lot of sugar. I figured, placebo is just a sugar pill, and if I failed at the psychological component, maybe sugar has the magical ability to make me feel better? This is not an excuse to dose up on sugar, I swear.

So far, so good, sugar is making me feel much better. Yes my throat is still burning as if I drank pH 3 hydrochloric acid instead of hot chocolate, but at least my headache is somewhat gone. I may or may not decide to feast on marshmallows in the middle of the night. I just wish my throat would stop burning.