Beyond Placebo

What are the boundaries of the placebo effect?This volume brings together leaders in neuroscience, psychiatry, and clinical neurology to examine how the brain shapes the experience of symptoms in neurological disease. Beyond the classic view that sham or inert treatments can produce real improvements in illness, it explores how expectation, perception, and context influence the expression of neurological conditions — including functional neurological symptoms, psychogenic non-epileptic seizures, perceptual disturbances, chronic pain, and other symptom domains in which brain-based modulation is central.By linking experimental research with everyday clinical practice, the book clarifies why certain symptoms persist despite appropriate care, why therapeutic responses vary across individuals and cultures, and how neural mechanisms of expectation and meaning shape the course of disease.Providing clinicians, researchers, and trainees with a coherent framework for conditions in which brain-mediated modulation plays a defining role, this volume offers practical guidance for integrating emerging science into the evaluation and management of complex neurological presentations.