Pain is notoriously responsive to placebo effect and some researchers believe surgery and other complex interventions may produce may produce the biggest placebo improvement of all.
Whether American doctors addicted to expensive high-tech treatments whose apparent efficacy may be largely due to the placebo effect (think many types of back surgery) would ever do this is another question entirely.
"There is the potential that the majority of surgery we do for symptom relief is only effective because of the placebo effect--with significant potential of harming the patient, " says Dr. Nelda Wray, research chief at the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs.
They found that giving statins before surgery reduced the incidence of post-operative atrial fibrillation, suggesting a beneficial effect for patients with a statin treatment when compared to patients without a statin therapy.
Queen Mary's losing in-patient surgery, which means it would no longer carry out operations such as knee and hip replacements and in effect become a community health centre.