The Placebo Effect - is it real or just imagined?

In my opinion, the Placebo Effect is a special occasion when you are given a "Placebo" pill which means that the pill is fake. The pill can simply be sugar or anything else that wont make your pain go away, but once you take the pill, your brain starts to think that you are going to feel better because you already drank a pill for it. That is how the placebo effect works. In the class we have learned many different cases in which Placebo pills have worked for a lot of people that have a really messed up situation. For example, there can be fake operations in which the whole procedure of sleeping the person and cutting you open is done, and all of a sudden the person starts feeling better because he thinks that he had the surgery already.

Henry Beecher is a famous psychologist that made a paper called the Powerful Placebo and it was really an impact. While this paper did not introduce the idea of placebo reactions, its importance was that it stressed—for the first time—the necessity of double-blind, placebo-controlled clinical trials. In his 1955 paper, Beecher only speaks of placebo effects on specific occasions when he is contrasting them with drug effects.


These studies have problems like for example, the people that are being tested might think that they are being fooled when they are told that they were taking placebo pills. 
In my opinion, I think that Placebo pills have been a great discovery because maybe with these pills some doctors can cure incredible cure-free diseases and it is a great invention!