The fact that this has been raised at all in such a subjective fashion could have a chilling effect on service personnel sharing their faith at all.

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The story of Natrecor highlights the enormous impact of the placebo effect, the power the expectation improvement to influence patients subjective assessment of symptoms.

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One conclusion emerging from the research, says Irving Kirsch, a professor at Harvard Medical School who wrote the preface to the volume, is that the effect is strongest for those disorders that are predominantly mental and subjective, a conclusion backed by a meta-analysis of placebo studies that was carried out in 2010 by researchers at the Cochrane Collaboration, an organisation that reviews evidence for medical treatments.

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If you get all jazzed up about a mysterious placebo effect, that positive thinking may help you feel even slightly better on subjective scales.

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