Chronic Pain Gets Placebo Treatment

The phrase “never underestimate the power of the placebo” is typically used as a snarky response to symptoms that seemingly improve from therapies that have shown to have no real biological effect. Yet now, investigators at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine believe they can reliably predict which chronic pain patients will respond to a sugar placebo pill based on the patients' brain anatomy and psychological characteristics.Their brain is already tuned to re