Of course it’s when you have one of those awful days that you are most likely to seek help by visiting a homeopath or some other dispenser of medical treatments unsupported by solid scientific evidence. The next day you wake up and…you feel better! The treatment works! The placebo effect may have helped, but you probably would have felt better the next day even if you had received no treatment at all—thanks to regression to the mean, a fact that won’t occur to you unless you stop and think carefully, instead of going with the tip-of-your-nose conclusion.
