My wife’s phone and my phone often have different weather forecasts. And sometimes we notice that the weather right behind the house is different from the weather in front of the house.
My family used to claim some Cherokee ancestry, so I looked into the records, including the Dawes Roll. It turns out that some of my ancestors were scoundrels. They could not fool the government investigators.
There is another explanation for some placebo effects: preparations which are supposed to be inert sometimes actually are not inert. For example, artificial colorings can sometimes have an effect. My father-in-law (a senior chemist for Johnson & Johnson) figured this out.
I’ll have to ask my daughter-in-law about this. I know no Chinese, but she is from Beijing.