Could taking a placebo, a pill which contains nothing but ground rice, really help cure back pain?
Jim Pearce is certainly convinced.
When we first met, the 71-year-old was confined to a wheelchair and using morphine because of his back pain.
But after he took part in our study, taking our convincingly-labeled blue-and-white-striped "new" painkillers, he seemed like a different person.
The only thing was that he'd been taking placebos; dummy pills - they contained nothing but ground rice. But they worked.
"I just woke up one morning and I thought, hang about, I haven't got a twinge in my back. And it's been going from strength to strength."
I asked him which he preferred, my pills or the morphine?
"I got rid of the morphine and kept taking your blue pills."
Jim was one of 100 people who took part in a trial for our BBC2 Horizon programme: Can my brain cure my body?
It was a back pain study - with a twist. The twist being that everyone, unknowingly, was getting placebo? We wanted to see if people taking the pills would get better anyway?
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