Make the pain go away

New Scientist SPACE - Features - 13 things that do not make sense:

The placebo effect
DON'T try this at home. Several times a day, for several days, you induce pain in someone. You control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. Guess what? The saline takes the pain away.

Most of the other 12 scientific whaaaa?s are more a part of the physical universe. Thinking of them reminds me of conversations with Mike and Brian back at Casa Bonita. I felt proud to theorize with them about the state of the universe. There was a strange hope that they or someone we knew would one day tell the world about the world's mysterious secrets.

Trying to understand these problems feels like hugging an elephant. The skin is rough, the hair is coarse, and the elephant probably does not care.