Placebos, not pills The Anatomy of Hope:
How People Prevail in the Face of Illness
By Jerome Groopman
Random House, 2004, $14.95 The Role of Complementary and Alternative Medicine:
Accommodating Pluralism
Edited by Daniel Callahan
Georgetown University Press, 2002, $29.95 The western medical establishment and drug industry have an uneasy relationship with the placebo effect. Both acknowledge that patients often benefit from their own expectations. But neither seems willing to support efforts to study the underlying physiology of the effect.

After reading Jerome Groopman's The Anatomy of Hope and Daniel Callahan's The Role of Complementary and Alternative Medicine, and much of the body of peer-reviewed research on the biological basis of the placebo mechanism, one begins to understand why placebo-enhanced healing gives doctors pause. There is growing evidence of its existence but little conclusive data as to how and why it works. And there is even less research on how to best manipulate the effect for the welfare of patients.