The research effort on the placebo effect deepens and widens.

“In a report published online Feb. 15 in The BMJ, researchers at Stanford call for more health care providers to place emphasis on the importance of individual mindsets and social context in healing … (and) to develop more studies that measure the physical effects of these psychosocial elements to understand and quantify patients’ subjective experiences of expectations, connection and trust.”

“We have long been mystified by the placebo effect,” Crum said. “But the placebo effect isn’t some mysterious response to a sugar pill. It is the robust and measurable effect of three components: the body’s natural ability to heal, the patient mindset and the social context. When we start to see the placebo effect for what it really is, we can stop discounting it as medically superfluous and can work to deliberately harness its underlying components to improve health care.”

Read the article here.