THE POWER OF PLACEBOS:

Ted Kaptchuk, a professor at Harvard Medical School who ran the experiment, said his colleagues initially thought he was crazy at the beginning of the study. But it worked: He says roughly 60 percent of the subjects in his study reported getting better, even though they knew they were taking a placebo.

A placebo, Kaptchuk explained, is an inert substance, usually something like cellulose, starch or sugar. But the “placebo effect” goes well beyond the actual pill.

“Placebo effect is everything that surrounds that pill — the interaction between patient, doctor or nurse,” Kaptchuk said. “It’s the symbols, it’s the rituals. These are powerful forces.”

Doctors have understood the power of placebos at least since they were first used in clinical trials in the ‘50s, but fake pills work only in certain cases.

“There are a lot of illnesses you don’t give placebos for, [like] cancer, lowering cholesterol,” Kaptchuk said. “Basically the scope where a placebo effect is relevant is any symptom that the brain can modulate by itself.”

In those cases, just making an appointment, going to a doctor and taking a pill suggests something may happen.

Dr. Arthur Barsky, a psychiatrist at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, says that people will report some symptomatic relief from taking a substance that is not biologically active about 35 percent of the time. “It’s very impressive.”

Yep.