It began in 2001 with my earliest research, in which I investigated placebo effects, working closely with Ted Kaptchuk at Harvard Medical School.

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Ted Kaptchuk, its director, is studying how patients respond to sham treatments, as well as the importance of patient's faith in a treatment.

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For years, Ted Kaptchuk performed acupuncture at a tiny clinic in Cambridge, a few miles from his current office, at the Harvard Medical School.

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Harvard researcher Ted Kaptchuk trained for five years in traditional Chinese medicine, but then became one of the leading researchers into the placebo effect.

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My favorite illustration of this is a study written up by Harvard placebo researcher Ted Kaptchuk and colleagues in 2008 in the British Medical Journal. 262 patients with severe irritable bowel syndrome were randomly assigned to either be on a waiting list, to get fake acupuncture, or to get fake acupuncture accompanied by lots of warm talk.

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