Placebo is not a “sugar pill” but the result of stimulation of neural networks involved in central analgesia and in mood regulation

Placebo was intended as a pill devoid of any active principle  capable to influence or relieve so called psychosomatic diseases.  More recently, it has been shown that placebo can be useful in  surgical practice. In fact, sham operation can induce significant benefit. Emotions have been shown to play a pivotal role in placebo.  Present observation concerns an attempt to investigate and  therapeutically use scientific evidences in a placebo devoted to  sufferers from chronic migraine pain. The present approach has its background in the fact that placebo analgesia has been shown to  largely consist either in the activation both of analgesia pathways  and of emotional systems as well as genetic and epigenetic  expressions leading to specific behavior. In this perspective  placebo has been used to empower a conventional therapy that was scored as unsatisfactory by the enrolled chronic migraine  sufferers. Here proposed placebo seems to transform an ineffective  drug therapy into an effective pain relieving approach.