Wired has an excellent article on placebos, and how it actually works. Well, most of the time.

A stem-cell startup called Osiris Therapeutics got a drubbing on Wall Street in March, when it suspended trials of its pill for Crohn’s disease, an intestinal ailment, citing an “unusually high” response to placebo. Two days later, Eli Lilly broke off testing of a much-touted new drug for schizophrenia when volunteers showed double the expected level of placebo response.

The weird thing is that placebos are actually… better? While people have been tricked into taking sugar pills for years, it seems like it has an improving effect now. There is a science to placebos, even if it’s nothing but… nothing. Colored pills make a difference.

Oddly enough, you’d think patients would have known by now whether or not they were being tricked.

What does this mean? Is it really mind over matter when it comes to medicine? Nobody can say for sure, but it seems hardly settling that you may or may not me taking what is merely a fake. Perhaps all medicine is overrated. Perhaps this whole homeopathy thing is a sham. Forget all about stuff like acupuncture and having needles on your funny parts. Maybe the brain and the psychology behind it all does work.