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I was recently reading about the placebo effect. I'm sure most of us have seen various news articles about how massively effective a placebo can be. This paragraph nicked from the wiki gives a quick intro:

Beecher (1955) reported that about a quarter of patients who were administered a placebo, e.g. against back pain, reported a relief or diminution of pain. Remarkably, not only did the patients report improvement, but the improvements themselves were often objectively measurable, and the same improvements were typically not observed in patients who did not receive the placebo.

Because of this effect, government regulatory agencies approve new drugs only after tests establish not only that patients respond to them, but also that their effect is greater than that of a placebo (by way of affecting more patients, by affecting responders more strongly or both). Such a test or clinical trial is called a placebo-controlled study. Because a doctor's belief in the value of a treatment can affect his or her behaviour, and thus what his or her patient believes, such trials are usually conducted in "double-blind" fashion: that is, not only are the patients made unaware when they are receiving a placebo, the doctors are made unaware too. Recently, it has even been shown that "mock" surgery can have similar effects, and so some surgical techniques must be studied with placebo controls (rarely double blind, due to the difficulty involved). To merit approval, the group receiving the experimental treatment must experience a greater benefit than the placebo group.

So the placebo effect is pretty powerful. Even having read a bit about faith healings and how "fake surgeries" can make a patient feel better (see the character of Andy Kaufmann played in "The Man in the Moon") I wasn't expecting to find this brilliant paper (Blackwell et. al. 1972), which discusses giving placebos of different colours to some patients. Their results are startling:
"The colour of a placebo can influence its effects. When administered without information about whether they are stimulants or depressives, blue placebo pills produce depressant effects, whereas red placebos induce stimulant effects"

It really highlights how our expectations about things affect what really happens. I vividly remember when I was little going for two injections. During one of them the doctor got me to close my eyes and look the other way. I clenched up, ready to have some sort of knitting needle jammed straight through my arm, and sure enough it bloody well hurt. I came out of there in tears. One week later I needed another injection and was absolutely terrified. When I got in there, the doctor told me that it would sting a little bit, but was nothing to be scared of. Then he distracted me by asking what I learnt at school today and the injection was over before I even noticed. It seems that expectation is everything.

One one last note, this talk about red and blue pills got me thinking about the matrix


The red pill and the blue pill. I'm sure it happened subconsciously but it was written that the blue pill lets you live out the rest of your life in ignorance and safely. The red pill is the one full of excitement and danger.

Just like the placebo effect.