Doctors have been using your mind for decades to help you feel better. Also known as the placebo effect, using pills and therapies known to have no effect on the body can sometimes have a significant effect on your health and wellness.

In medical practice, a placebo is a treatment that appears real, but isn't. Oftentimes researchers use placebos in medical studies to determine if there is a measurable difference between the treatment being tested and the effect your mind has over your body.

Doctors have used pills, therapies and shots in order to effect a change in your health without increasing your risk to potential side effects from other treatments. Research into this effect has found a relationship between what you could reasonably expect from your treatment and your body's response.

In other words, if you expect a pill or shot to lessen your pain, you may experience less pain. However, researchers have also found that placebos have an effect on healing and body chemistry as well, demonstrating the power of your mind on self-healing.

Placebos Harness the Power of Your Mind

While scientists can't determine how they work, they have found there is a hierarchy of effectiveness to placebos. Some placebo treatments just work better than others. For instance:¹

•    Placebo surgery works better than placebo injections
•    Placebo injections work better than placebo pills; color and size of the pill makes a difference
•    Sham acupuncture treatment works better than a placebo pill
•    The more expensive, the better and the more doses per day, the better the effect
•    Telling the patient, "This will relieve your pain" works better than saying "This might help"

Belief has a powerful effect on your mind and healing your body. Interestingly, recent investigations point to a growing effectiveness of placebos among Americans.² This is having a powerful influence on the development of new painkillers.

The response of clinical trial participants to placebo medications to treat neuropathic pain has increased steadily over a 23-year period between 1990 and 2013.

This change has effectively reduced the margin of benefit between placebos and active drugs. This change makes it much more difficult to establish a statistical difference between placebos and the active medication.

As the response to placebos is getting more powerful, it is more challenging to prove a drug actually does what is intended.^3,4