(Reuters) - People who don’t believe their pain medicine will work can actually reduce or even cancel out the effectiveness of the drug, and images of their brains show how they are doing it, scientists said on Wednesday. Researchers from Britain and Germany used brain scans to map how a person’s feelings and past experiences can influence the effectiveness of medicines, and found that a powerful painkilling drug with a true biological effect can appear not to be working if a patient has been primed to expect it to fail.
