Placebo effect

Definition: any effect that seems to be a consequence of administering a placebo; the change is usually beneficial and is assumed result from the person's faith in the treatment or preconceptions about what the experimental drug was supposed to do; pharmacologists were the first to talk about placebo effects but now the idea has been generalized to many situations having nothing to do with drugs

Definition: The tendency of any medication or treatment, even an inert or ineffective one, to exhibit results simply because the recipient believes that it will work.