Placebo is potentially the most powerful medicine.
The fact that an empty pill produces any affect at all makes
you reconsider what medicine is, but to see it occasionally
work so well is shocking and amazing.
What's the mechanism?
Medical personnel who call the placebo effect
“spontaneous remission” or try to explain it as
random fluctuation are admitting that they don’t
understand it and would prefer not to think about it,
probably because that would require re-examination of a
dearly held worldview. Dismissing the placebo effect as
randomness does not actually explain anything. It only begs a
paraphrasing of the same question, “How can randomness
heal people?”