Importance of placebo effect in pain management

The word placebo is derived from the Latin verb to please and, as early as 1811, appeared in the Hooper's Medical Dictionary as a medical treatment aimed at pleasing - a placebo was defined as an epithet given to any medication adopted more to please than to benefit the patient (Hooper 1817). In the modern day era, Tilburt et al. refer to the placebo effect as positive clinical outcomes caused by a treatment that is not attributable to its known physical properties or mechanism of action (Tilburt et al. 2008).