The Tooting Salon

I am, as you’ll know if you’ve looked at my website, half of a comedy science double act, the Comedy Research Project. Tongue in cheek, we claim to be testing the hypothesis that science can be funny, by locking a control audience into an adjacent room without comedians to see who laughs more. Sometimes we look at the bemused faces on the front row and wonder whether the control audience would be laughing louder. Are we, after all, just the placebo comedians in a double-blind trial?
Obviously, our audience is laughing too, but that’s the thing about the placebo effect – it does work. Tests consistently show that patients getting a dummy treatment do better than those getting no treatment at all. One of the few occasions when nothing is… er… better than nothing. Which is why new drugs don’t have to prove themselves better than nothing – they have to prove themselves better than placebo.
Now, scientists have gone one better. In a placebo face-off, they tested placebo tablets against placebo acupuncture. It’s already been shown that all placebos are not equal – taking four sugar pills works better than taking two, for example, and some colours work better than others. Now we also know that having needles apparently stuck in you (they retracted inside the stem) is more effective than apparently taking drugs.
Not so amazing. To pretend to stick needles into you, somebody (an out of work actor, perhaps) has to spend time talking to you, listening to you, and touching you. All things that make you feel better than lying on the sofa alone with only daytime TV for company. So here’s my idea – instead of ploughing NHS money into alternative therapies with no evidence that they work, why not just hire the out of work actors to come round to your house, be nice to you and make you soup?
There’s always the danger that this would be too pleasant – that recovery would be delayed as patients enjoy being pampered by people who are better-looking than average, and in some cases readier with their sexual favours (I’ve worked with actors). But at least they’d be saved from one of the negative effects of chronic illness, the narrowing of your world to yourself and your symptoms. I challenge anyone to remain self-obsessed in the company of an actor who is telling you about the parts they nearly got, should have got, or might get in the near future. It’s a bracing reminder that there’s a world out there with bigger problems than yours. Or theirs.