How Real Is The Placebo Effect?

Newsweek, June, 2001 by Fred Guterl

The medical establishment has long held that a substance can have a medicinal effect simply because a patient believes it will. The conventional wisdom about this placebo effect, which harks back to a paper published in 1955, has been that it works for one patient in three. That's not a bad ratio, especially for a treatment that has no side effects. Some doctors have even proposed using the placebo effect as a bona fide medical treatment. But many doctors are uncomfortable with the easygoing notion that mere belief can heal the body. Late last month a paper in the journal Science gave them some ammunition, suggesting that the power of placebo is a myth.

The study certainly gores some oxen. A whole medical industry has sprung up based on the mind's presumed power over the...