Neuroscientific and medical applications of the placebo effect

Fooling our own brains is an appealing concept: everyone enjoys optical illusions, magic tricks and riddles. But can fooling our brains help heal our bodies? When it comes to taking medicine, people have consistently proven themselves to be highly suggestible. The color of pills, the number of pills and the brand of pills can influence our assumptions about the medications we are taking. We tend to think that capsules are stronger than pills, and that injections are more powerful than medicine taken orally. Even surgery has been evaluated for its potential placebo effect: in one experiment on arthroscopic knee surgery, both the osteoarthritis patients receiving the operation and those who just got an incision and stitches showed significant decreases in knee pain.