ABSTRACT
Now, friends have told me this isn’t the right note to end on. So downbeatarguing that placebos are an evolutionary mistake. What about that woman with her metastatic cancer, for example? It seems she owed her life to the snake oil-or rather, in her case, to the guided visualization. Isn’t there a case to be made for the real health benefits of submitting to at least some of these illusions?
