The placebo effect isn't mind over matter as you lot are discussing, thats psychosomatic effect, I.E. bodily symptoms effected by a mental state. I thought I was sick, so i became sick. Placebo is fake medication. Plain and simple.... oh unless your a professor studying it. The placebo effect isn't as simple as it used to be . Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy recently did some work on the placebo effect. Taken from New Scientist Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away. This is the placebo effect: somehow, sometimes, a whole lot of nothing can be very powerful. Except it's not quite nothing. When Fabrizio Benedetti carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared. So what is going on? Doctors have known about the placebo effect for decades, and the naloxone result seems to show that the placebo effect is somehow biochemical. But apart from that, we simply don't know