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When you go to the doctor, you like to come away with a prescription. It makes you feel better to know you will get some medicine. But the doctor knows that medicine is not always needed. Sometimes all a sick person needs is some reassurance that all will be well. In such cases the doctor may prescribe a placebo. A placebo is a sugar pill, a harmless shot, or an empty capsule. Even though they have no medicine in them, these things seem to make people well. The patient thinks it is medicine and begins to get better. How does this happen? The study of the placebo opens up new knowledge about the way the human body can heal itself. It is as if there was a doctor in each of us. The"doctor"will heal the body for us if we let it. But it is not yet known just how the placebo works to heal the body. Some people say it works because the human mind fools itself. These people say that if the mind is fooled into thinking it got medicine, then it will act as if it did, and the body will feel better.