article in Scientific American about the placebo effect

here's an excerpt (I bolded certain parts for emphasis):

As evidence of this idea, counseling psychologist Cynthia McRae of the University of Denver and her colleagues reported in 2004 the surprising success of a sham brain surgery in improving the quality of life of patients with advanced Parkinson’s disease. Surgeons performed the sham operation to compare its efficacy with that of implanting human embryonic dopamine neurons into the brains of Parkinson’s patients, who suffer from a lack of dopamine. In McRae’s follow-up study, which assessed the patients’ quality of life up to a year later, the researchers found that the patients who received the sham surgery were doing just as well physically, socially and emotionally as were the patients who had received the new cells. What mattered was not the transplant itself but whether a patient thought he or she had received it.


Read the entire article here:

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?id=placebo-effect-a-cure-in-the-mind