The remedy that was in the room

A newborn in a building in Sheikh Zayed cries every evening for about three hours, and nobody can say why.

By the second week his mother has been told about a dozen remedies. A particular way of holding him. A warm cloth on the stomach. A spoonful of something from the herbalist that her aunt swears by. A kind of bottle a cousin used. Each one comes from someone who tried it and watched the crying stop.

The crying does stop, eventually, as it does for most babies, at roughly the time it was always going to. Whatever happened to be in the room that week takes the credit. The next mother in the building hears about it from someone who is certain, and the remedy climbs one more floor.

That is how a placebo gets chosen. The problem is tangled, it plays out over weeks, and it is frightening. That leaves the mind room to look for something firm to stand on. Then a person with a story hands you one.

A good deal of marketing is the same work: building the story that makes a product feel as if it helped. I do not think that is shameful. A remedy that costs little, harms nothing and gives an exhausted mother one calm evening is doing something real.

The trouble starts where the story stands in for the thing that would actually work. The warm cloth is fine. The warm cloth instead of a doctor, when the crying is a sign of something else, is not.

A placebo is a gift when it buys patience, and a cost when it buys delay.