My question to the guest talking about placebo, and my belief that early alchemists knew of placebo from as early as 800AD. The proof of their knowing is that they propagated a story of the unicorn and romanticized the whole process of the capture of such an animal, and rendering its horn, the alicorn as having magical healing. Not only did the apocatheries of those times use the unicorn as a form of job protection, as anyone that got into the trade could only go through apprenticeship and once mastering their trade would be given knowledge of its fiction. The whole populace, including kingsa nd royalty were duped by these alchemists for the sake of profit and job protection, sort of the first forms of unions. There was also the realization that in hopeless cases that they had no remedy for they would shave shards of the alicorn, and knew that there was a possibilty of the person healing due to the belief that it would, placebo, mind over matter. And that it lasted over 1000 yrs as a remedy until the Italian renaissance. I propose that early alchemists and there dispensing alicorn as a healing product were far ahead in understanding of the power of the body healing itself and placebo than we do today in 2014, and to use a lie to protect their profession to their own ends by making every apocathery that was a valid member of the profession, to be valid to the community had to have an alicorn hanging by a rope within the premises for all that enetered to see, sort of like a trade licence and goverment approval to trade to the public.