n Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the above experiment, he added a final twist by adding naloxone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. The shocking result? The pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared.
In the recent Edge Annual Question (what do you believe is true even though you cannot prove it?), John Skoyles had an interesting idea about the placebo effect: that we’d evolved such that our immune system was receptive to social factors, so if someone we believed had more expertise than us – a healer – gave us a “cure”, we reacted appropriately, ie our immune system gave up fighting and assumed the problem was over. Not sure how Benedetti’s finding would fit in with that, mind you.
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