Belief is a powerful tool and doctors are still often astounded by what belief can do to a patient's health

In the summer of 1994, a surgeon named J. Bruce Moseley conducted an amazing experiment. Doctors had long been aware of the 'placebo effect' - the idea that you can give a patient a placebo, a fake pill, tell the patient that this pill is real and will cure their pain, cough or sore throat. Sure enough, because the patient believes the pill to be real, they often end up cured.

Mosely wondered just how strong the power of the placebo effect could be. Would it work on something more than pills for minor aches and illnesses? Would it work for more serious medical conditions that involved surgery?

Moseley had 10 patients scheduled for an operation intended to relieve the arthritis pain in their knees. The patients were middle-aged men. All 10 were wheeled into an operating room at the Houston Veterans Affairs Medical Center. They were draped, examined and anesthetized. They went through all the elaborate procedures designed to make them BELEIVE that they were about to go through a serious medical operation. They were then dispatched to the recovery room and the next morning sent home, equipped with crutches and a painkiller.

But there the similarities ended between all 10.

For while two of the men would undergo the standard arthroscopic surgery for their condition -- the scraping and rinsing of the knee joint -- and three would have the rinsing alone, five would have no recognized surgical procedure at all. Their surgery would be a placebo, a make-believe surgery designed to fool the patient.

The result: All 10 patients reported that their arthritis has been considerably healed.

Mosely's experiment was repeated by a team of surgeons in Texas on 180 patients with osteoarthritis in the knee. Two-thirds got the actual surgery. But for a third, the surgeons faked it – they went through the motions of giving a tranquilizer, making three incisions and pretending to do the surgery.

According to the New York Times

"The researchers found patients who underwent the placebo surgery were just as likely to report pain relief as those who received the real procedure. It seems for osteoarthritis patients, the relief is all in patients' minds."