Discover 25 Times the Placebo Effect Fooled Modern Science, from sham surgeries to antidepressants. Learn how the brain's ...

Older adults taking placebo pills for just three weeks experienced measurable improvements in memory, physical performance ...

A recent experiment shows that elderly volunteers who ingested placebo capsules for three weeks recorded measurable ...

Stanford University researchers found that depressed people given ketamine before undergoing anesthesia improved just as much as those given saline. Reading time 3 minutes New research might ...

The first time the placebo effect really got under my skin was when I read that roughly one-third of people with irritable bowel syndrome improve on placebo treatments alone. Usually this statistic is ...

Earlier this month, a Food and Drug Administration panel concluded that a common decongestant ingredient used in drugs like Sudafed and NyQuil doesn’t work. The panel agreed that while the ingredient, ...

Dr. Kaptchuk is a professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. He directs the Harvard-wide program in placebo studies hosted at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. See more of our coverage ...

Experiments conducted in our lab have clearly shown that when people’s cultural schemas are carefully curated and met, the subsequent shut-down of inefficient ‘hard thinking’ cognitive resources can ...

In a recent post on the Trump Effect, I described a short list of cognitive biases that possess the power to direct our attention, prescribe our beliefs and preferences, and guide most of what we do ...