What is the placebo effect, really?

The thing that most people fail to understand about medicine is that, for the most part, you take drugs and receive therapies from your doctors in order for your body to get to a place where it can manage to do the job on its own. We spend billions of dollars developing drugs that only work a tiny bit better than the healing power of the body. In this video I explain some of the underlying ways that the innate and adaptive immune system work as well as the curious way we talk about what it means to get better while under medical care.