Everybody who cares to look at the placebo agrees that it’s pretty weird. The thing is, the closer you look, the weirder it gets.

For example, how can we begin to understand that an inactive substance can scuttle a pharmaceutical company’s premier drug¹, trigger improvement in a study of stem cells in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease², and act as either a bronchodilator or induce respiratory depression in asthmatics, depending on what either the subjects or the experimenters believe³?

Or, for that matter that fake treatments can bring about unexpected health deteriorations induce headaches and trigger infections, simply because the subjects expect them to.

Until recently, the placebo effect was thought of as a psychological manifestation, probably affecting people of weak intellect or character.

Suddenly, it’s different. Scientists, including Fabrizio Benedetti, Professor of Physiology and Neuroscience at the University of Turin’s Medical School and arguably the world’s greatest expert in the field, have established without doubt that the placebo effect has identifiable biochemical substrata, confirming the long-held suspicion that it is a profound but natural response to a non-chemical stimulus nudging the organism on to a recuperative course.

In the real world of face-to face health care, medicine that acknowledges and incorporates emotion as an active force is at least as important to good practice as Evidence-Based Medicine.

For years we’ve taught Registrars and undergraduate medical students that however much they are encouraged to embrace evidence-based medicine (EBM), they should not lose sight of what patients expect – recognition of their emotions and the role they play in healing and health. Within Medical NLP, we champion the missing part of a whole-person model, an emotion-based approach to medicine we call EmBM.