The placebo effect helps us to understand how the context around a therapy influences the treatment outcome. A placebo is a dummy medical treatment that simulates a real treatment, so that the patient believes that a therapy is being administered. Several lines of evidence indicate that placebo analgesia is mediated by the endogenous opioid systems. In this chapter we review these findings to make it clear that the placebo effect is worthy of scientific inquiry. The placebo effect is a change in the body, or the body-mind unit, that occurs as a result of the symbolic significance attributed to an event or object in the healing environment (Brody 2000). To be more specific, a placebo is a dummy medical treatment and the placebo effect is the response to it. It is important to point out that the effect is not due to the inertness of the treatment per se. In fact, an inert medical treatment is administered within a context and it is the context that plays the crucial role. When we talk about context, basically we are talking about everything to do with a medical treatment, such as the words uttered by doctors and nurses, the smell of a drug, the sight of hospitals and room layouts, or the touch of a needle or a complex apparatus.
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