Michael Mosley wasn't sure about getting involved in his latest experiment. 150 people were looking to him for a cure for their chronic back pain and unbeknownst to them, all he would be giving them was rice flour.
Mosley is a science journalist whose documentary, The Placebo Experiment: Can My Brain Cure My Body?, on the power of the placebo effect will air this Thursday at 9pm on BBC2. He told Ray D'Arcy that the people participating in the trial thought that half of them would get a drug to treat their pain and the other half would be given a placebo. In reality, there was no wonder drug and they were all on a regimen of placebos.
"We weren't exactly lying but we weren't exactly telling the truth, either."
The participants were slow to report any progress, throwing Michael into a mild state of panic.
"It really was going pretty disastrously wrong…It certainly started slowly. Most people kind of went, well I'm doing it and it's not having much impact."
Things soon picked up, Michael says, with many people saying they were experiencing a significant reduction in back pain. One man, a TV technician who had been suffering from back pain for 20 years, returned to work after just one week.
"There's so much evidence now about the power of the placebo. I have no doubt at all that these people had serious, significant back pain. And I also have no doubt that it got better."
Listen back to the full interview on The Ray D'Arcy Show here.