The placebo effect is one of the strangest and most fascinating phenomena in medicine and psychology. Sometimes people ...

The first time the placebo effect really got under my skin was when I read that roughly one-third of people with irritable bowel syndrome improve on placebo treatments alone. Usually this statistic is ...

It has been well documented in medical literature that when people believe they are receiving treatment, they will actually experience a reduction in symptoms—even if their “treatment” is an inactive ...

A newly identified brain pathway in mice could explain why placebos, or interventions designed to have no therapeutic effect, still relieve pain. Developing drugs that target this pathway may lead to ...

When you were a child and fell playing outside, a single bandage — a placebo of sorts — could take away the pain. The placebo effect has long been somewhat of a medical mystery. While researchers ...

Since the effects of an illness are easily compounded by the psychosomatic pain of thinking it is worse than it actually is, there may be a reasonable explanation for finding that a placebo works even ...

What do the strange pain-relieving and healing that can take place under hypnosis tell us about consciousness? Perhaps ...